Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day, my lovely clients and readers! Valentine’s Day is frequently mocked as a made-up holiday that forces people to show their love, but…isn’t every holiday? I digress. Today is about matchmaking because I’m in the matchmaking business. But rather than finding you the one person to spend the rest of your life with, I use personalized marketing strategies to find you the many clients who are already looking for you. 

So, is marketing really like matchmaking? Is this a thematic reach to fit the Valentine’s theme? And will there be references to Yente in Fiddler on the Roof? The answers to all these questions are, thankfully, yes. Forward!

How Is Marketing Like Matchmaking? 

Look Through Your Book and Find Me a Perfect Match

The first thing you need to know about finding customers is that they’re already trying to find you. If you have a viable business, you’re providing a product or service that solves a problem for a specific group of people. 

Those people may be business owners, parents, people with a particular hobby, or something else. Whatever they are, there is a good chance that they’re already doing an internet search or asking their friends in their social networks about you. 

In other words, there’s someone out there for you. But unlike in a romantic comedy, you don’t have to wait for a meet-cute (or matchmaker if you’re in Anatevka). Instead, you need an expert who will use personalized marketing strategies to help the people looking for you find you. 

Honest Personalized Marketing Strategies Beat Out Gimmicks 

(He’s Handsome, He’s Young! Ok, He’s 62)

A lot of people think of marketing as being inherently dishonest. That’s because some of it, particularly ads, can be gimmicky and misleading. There was a great joke about this in the film The Invention of Lying. 

But here’s the thing. Even if you put aside the ethical concerns (which you shouldn’t), dishonesty in your marketing doesn’t make sense. Online personalized marketing strategies are for attracting the people who want what you’re doing. Why would you want to attract someone who won’t like you? 

Plenty of people are looking for your product or service (or if there aren’t, you might not have a viable business) so we create personalized marketing strategies to help them find you. 

This is a win-win scenario. 

If you were looking for a romantic partner, it would be foolish to claim in your profiles that you were a cat person who loves to spend your time hiking if you’re allergic to cats and prefer to spend your time indoors. You might end up attracting a hiker with cats! 

Then either you’d have to lie, or you’d have to disappoint the person. Either way, one of you ends up unhappy. But there’s a dog person who loves to watch old movies scouring the world for you. Why not be who you are? 

Marketing is like that, too. 

The same is true for your business. If you do a search for the friendliest restaurant in town and you go there only to find everyone is rude, you won’t be happy! If you complain and the manager says, “Well, we do mostly take out, but the food is the best in town,” you’ll leave disappointed and may even leave a bad review. 

Meanwhile, if that same restaurant had instead created a personalized marketing strategy for high-quality takeaway meals, someone else looking for that would have found them and been overjoyed. 

How Do We Create Personalized Marketing Strategies for You? 

One of POP’s differentiators that I’m very proud of is our ability to find your voice and speak the way you’d like us to speak for you. We do this with a proprietary survey that helps us learn what’s important to you and your customers and how you’d like to be represented. 

We’ve tweaked our survey over the years to improve it. But it doesn’t end there. We take our moniker as “your friendly neighborhood marketer” seriously. We continue to get to know you and strive to capture your voice, your value, and your values, adjusting as we go.

Honesty is the Best Policy

POP has blogged, posted, and spoken about how marketing is matchmaking before and how your personalized marketing strategy should always reflect the truth about who you are as a business. But it remains relevant and true. (And we don’t expect everyone to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every blog we’ve ever posted!)

So let us help you play to your strengths and find that perfect someone(s) who’s already looking at the stars and wishing for you. Happy Valentine’s Day, folks!