Looking back around 10 years, to a time when travel was easy and visiting wonderful places like the Vatican didn’t have to remain a dream.
I’ve just done the touristy stuff… when in Rome do as the Romans do… and visited the Vatican. And boy, for a marketing man, what a jaw dropping experience… such was my delight that I almost suffered a bout of involuntary incontinence!
You’ll remember that the most important black box any business can have is one that generates an endless supply of prospects all itching to buy… at your prices… and be so delighted with the transaction that they tell their friends.
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And it happens at the Vatican in spades… buses, taxis, carriages, private cars and every other conveyance known to man disgorge thousands of tourists armed with fistfuls of money ready to spend it on admission tickets, souvenirs, food, drink and anything else remotely connected to the place.
And do the vendors of these things take the money?
Bet your sweet bippy they do… in trunkfuls!
Made me think… what’s the marketing lesson here for all of us?
Simple! Having what your customers want and making it easy to buy.
Elisabetta Povoledo, reporting for the New York Times says that (my nomination for all time best marketer, the Vatican Inc itself) “charges admission prices of 15 euros ($A21) and has anxious tourists waiting in line — which can be two hours or longer in the summer and on some days reach about one and a half miles around Vatican City’s walls to the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square.”
With around a staggering 5 million visitors a year… in a structure originally built to accommodate a Renaissance papal court, not up to 20,000 visitors at a time shuffling around one another… the marketing potential is huge.
“Unlike many other cultural institutions,” Povoledo reports, “the Vatican Museums understood the importance of merchandising early on. They were among the first museums to have audio guides, and a restaurant has operated within its walls since 1975. It has also been selling guidebooks and monographs on its collections for some 20 years, recently branching out into new lines, like the high-end Vatican Library Collection, which includes merchandise like reproductions of documents from the Vatican’s archives and facsimiles of papal seals.”
They sure beat McDonalds at the “would you like fries with that” game!
Okay, okay I know that a trip to Rome, the eternal city, and the Vatican is high on everybody’s wish list so maybe I’m drawing a long bow about the easy marketing analogy.
But it still raises the question… what are you doing to tell your prospects that you have what they want in a way that is so persuasive, so attractive and so appealing that they beat your doors down and throw fistfuls of money at you?
It all boils down to how well you answer those three fundamental marketing questions…
- Who is my ideal client and how well do I know them so that I “walk in their moccasins” and really understand their needs, wants and desires; what are their worries concerns and fears, what keeps them awake at night?
- What have I done to so effectively distinguish myself/ my business from the hordes of competitors that I am the logical answer to why they should choose me/my business rather than any of my competitors, trying to do it themselves or giving up and doing nothing? Put simply how do I stand out from the crowd bidding for my ideal client’s attention?
- How do they find out about me? What have I done to ensure that I get into the eyes, ears and face of my ideal client so they know the answer to question 2 in clear and compellingly attractive terms that make my solution to their problems irresistible?
Get them right and you’ll have a mini-Vatican type marketing scenario on your hands!
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