How to market today’s uncertainty to your advantage

In Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he proves the relationship between the value proposition of an offer in order to make a consumer consider the risk. All marketing offers have a risk involved. Whether time, monetary, the stress of travel, risk of health today, they all have a risk-reward relationship. Daniel scientifically demonstrated the gap between the risk to reward by asking participants to flip a coin. With group A, he gave them $100 and said they could keep the money, or flip a coin to win $150 or nothing. What do you think they chose? The sure thing, certainty. Then he gave a different group a new proposition. They could keep the $100, or flip a coin and win $250 or nothing. What do you think most people chose? Over 80 percent took the risk when the offer was 250 percent greater than the position of certainty.

Today, people are dealing with the ‘certainty’ of their health which means not only do you need to make the risk-to-reward offer more compelling than a ratio of 250 percent, but you must provide supporting information offering certainty that traveling to your location is as safe, if not safer, than if they stayed within their community interacting with loose safety measures.

Marketing is about framing the message to get a rise out of people; tapping into their lizard brain that makes them react to information after consuming. The message needs to be reflective of the viewers so that they would engage with it by sharing it with their friends and followers. Below are five areas to innovate and think differently about how you can attract customers in the new normal of life.

Realign Your Product to Capture Regional Customers

Is your marketing strategy focused on capturing a regional audience? How can your product or service be adjusted to provide greater value to a market audience within close proximity to your location? Today, it is becoming far more natural to reach customers within close proximity than it is to reach customers in several countries. Depending on your product or service, you may be able to ease some of your marketing costs through cooperative efforts, both regionally and nationally.

Innovate Your Arrival Capture Rate

Dr. Spencer Johnson authored the best-selling book, Who Moved My Cheese. Johnson’s cheese is a metaphor about change, and the maze is where you look for it. The problem is that no source of cheese lasts forever, markets change, campaigns stop working, and the audience needs to shift.
What hasn’t changed for humanity is to remain informed. We have an inherent need to be “in the know” so that we can make more intelligent decisions that impact our lives. Most in-house resort marketing efforts lead with the incentive to induce action; however today, education and knowledge have become more intrinsically motivating. The process to increase a resort’s arrival capture rate should begin with the initial touchpoint of the reservation and move forward to communicate the value of information in a subtle, subliminal manner.

The challenge with this approach is aligning the sales operation to deliver on the consumer expects to receive valuable information regardless of the outcome of the presentation. However, statistics prove today that this approach has an accelerated arrival conversion and top-line revenue.

Digital Advertising for Today’s Customer

Digital marketing services are online platforms that enable you to design email or lead generation ad campaigns that produce an end result. They allow you to communicate better with your designated audience or reach out to new audiences all by creating compelling messages that not only engage with your brand, product, or service, but also captures interest and curiosity.

Digital marketing campaigns are essential components of a marketing strategy for any kind of business. It does not matter if you are marketing to drive-to consumers or beyond. These marketing tools will allow you to better communicate with your customers, inform them about your unique product offerings and attract them with customized offers, and much more. All this is done by using the direct response marketing approach through various social and digital platforms.

Direct response marketing elicits a specific, measured response from a person to a marketing ad. The ad must contain a strong call to action that is measurable so that analytics can be collected, and adjustments can be made. When using social platforms, the content needs to favor positive sentiment over negative, and exaggeration over subtlety.

Recommended platforms to consider are Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, Clickfunnels, etc.

There is No Unicorn Marketing Approach

There is no one approach that will give you everything you need. The realm of marketing is changing extremely fast, and the rate of change is accelerating. You cannot become a customer acquisition expert by reading endless content. At some point, you must jump in and get your hands dirty but test everything you do. Having a planned approach and path is important. I recommend trying this simple four-step approach.
Identify your Channels – Channels are all the ways you can reach and attract your audience. Remember, it is nearly impossible to become an expert in all of them because of the rate of change, so consider outsourcing when needed.

Identify the Pros/Cons of Each Channel – This process will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and uncover blind spots to fill the gaps through data analysis/testing. Your goal is to narrow your niche within each channel so that you don’t fall in the trap of becoming a generalist.
Go Deep on your Top 5 Channels – Select the areas that you are an expert in so that you can use your resources to generate the top 80-95 percent of your customers. Stop wasting resources that produce minimal results or exceed your cost per tour ceiling.

Create Compelling Content – Having compelling content to use for digital marketing will increase your reach and your ROI. The goal is to have high quality, relatable, and appealing content for your market to cause engagement.

Experience Reputation is the Key to Success

Strange things happen in the brain when you hear a good story. You connect with the surroundings and can visually picture it. Your senses activate hearing the sound of laughter, the ocean, or the smell of the breeze. Chances are your brain pulled you fully into the story with your imagination filling in the scene.

Today’s stories are about public health, safety, and security. We are afraid our human rights are being selectively diminished, being told what to do and how to do it. Today’s marketing message must tap the inner fear and anxiety we share while offering hope and freedom. Positioned properly, hope is the anecdote to emotional duress and pain.

David Stroeve is the owner and CEO of ADS Consulting Services, the timeshare industry’s foremost expert consulting firm specialized in helping companies improve their revenue processes and systems. For more information, please visit www.adsconsultingservice.com or email info@ads-cs.com.