What is your Experience?

What is your Experience?

“Reaching people isn’t the challenge – it’s connecting with people.”
– Charlie Horsie

Modern marketing is not about selling products. It’s about creating an experience that your customers want to be part of again and again.

The hardest part is defining that experience.

The Problem with Marketing:

You publish a blog and do everything right. Hundreds of people click through to read it and you’re feeling good.

Your Facebook posts pull in huge engagement. People are liking, sharing, and picking up what you’re putting down. The Owner pats you on the back. You’re feeling great.

You decide to venture into paid search. Through research and hard work, you achieve a low-cost-per-click and get tons of people to your

A month later, sales haven’t budged. The wind is going right out of your sails.

This happens all the time. Marketing often succeeds with no effect on sales.

Let me say that again…  a hopping Facebook page, slick logo and fancy signage doesn’t add up to increased revenue. They are the trees. Your Core Experience is the forest.

Your Core Experience:

Marketing isn’t democratic. A good blog doesn’t exist because it’s cool and trendy, but because it serves a higher purpose. Your website, flyers, TV commercials, signage, uniforms, all must march to a higher purpose. They must all be a reflection of the experience you want your customer to have.

If you’re a DIY landscaper, you may want a young couple to feel empowered to plant their new yard. If you’re a trendy, urban garden shop, you may focus on your young hipsters learning and getting engaged about houseplants.

Your core experience is why your customers come. While marketing tends to put products first, your customers want the inspiration, the stories, and promise of rich experience that the products offer. 

Your strategy starts with your experience. Take the time to meditate on it, define it, write it down and pin it over your computer. Every scrap of communication must be a reflection of that experience.

Finding It:

The graphics, blog, and photography is the last step of marketing, not the first. First, you need to articulate the higher purpose that it’s all moving towards.

Write 3 questions on a whiteboard: Who is your target customer, what value will you give them, and what will be the outcome for them.

Fill the whiteboard with brainstorming. Look for patterns in the thoughts and pull them together into 1-2 sentence statements for each question. From there, pull the most important words and concepts into a statement that unified all three. This is your Core Experience: it defines the who, what, and why of your content strategy.

At my Garden Center, it’s “Empowering younger woman to grow their own plants.” Note that it’s directed at my target customer, not necessarily my main customer (who are still older women).

It’s not meant to be reflective of your entire business model; do that and it will be so watered down it won’t mean anything. It’s a roadmap for how you want to craft your offline and online experience for years to come.

Take your time, and sleep on it to make sure it’s an intuitive and reasonable extension of your brand. If your strategy is a spider’s web, this is the central hub of all threads.

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