The Rise Of Soundbite Marketing In Trinidad and Tobago | by Ciji Shippley: Visual Brand Strategist

“Trinbagonian version of Sound Bite Marketing: a brief and striking message that easily attracts…*and leaves you hanging after!”

We have amazing local content creators whose work gets the job of attracting attention to your services done. But attraction alone doesn’t convert a prospect into a client.

According to Mailrefine, a sound bite is a short, catchy piece of video, audio, or speech that captures the essence of what you are saying but with the intention of enticing interest in the full-length source. Used in marketing, sound bites promote a product, service, or brand.

What we often see 9 out of 10 times in Trinidad and Tobago are what I call sound blips — brief attention-grabbing messages absent any redirection that shows a fully developed productized idea applied to a problem someone had.

This is the crux of *The Witch’s Brew™ Effect.

A sound bite from an episode of your podcast for example, when you post it, it’s ushering people into your world, but its function is redirecting ideal clients (if you’re selling a service) back to the full episode not merely for context but to eventually, down the line if not immediately, work with you.

But if you don’t know how that podcast supports someone’s entrance into your world, or you don’t know where it fits on the roadmap of someone eventually working with you, then you have an obstacle in the client’s journey you need to remove or rethink the position of.

The witch’s brew played a supporting role in a much bigger agenda for the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel. So attraction is only the first step to a much deeper goal.

For example, “going viral” gets your foot in the door long enough for you to say something specific the prospect self-identifies with to buy-in to your first step.

In a more modest example, I had a meeting in July this year with a big company in San Juan, which sold itself on my visual branding approach after speaking with me late last year. Before that, a past client I gained from my article ‘One Of These Things Is NOT Like The Other!’, in a post in my Facebook group, opened up about how much she valued “the thought process behind my approach to design”. Another client referred to me, contacted me, already pre-sold on my services because, as she put it “I take my time to explain things”. She later expanded on this, praising my “critical thinking” and “dumbing down” of the branding process, noting it demonstrates my ability to “understand how it feels to be in another person’s shoes.”

That said, not everyone you attract has your best interest at heart.

Remember when no one believed in your business before it blew up? It was like planting seeds in rocky soil — hard to imagine growth, but you knew the roots were strong beneath the surface. Now, how many times have you encountered people who, after your hard work and success, are quick to pitch themselves? I’ve seen first-hand (in a similar situation) how they present their shiny promises with a somewhat veiled self-serving agenda.

On the other hand, 17K eyeballs on your services isn’t a bad gig — but relying on attraction alone is short-sighted because you don’t want the prospect’s ears to merely perk up; if they’re a good fit, you want to convert them into a client. This is why I don’t stop at attraction. I go a step further helping those I consider ideal to work with see application of my solution to their visual branding problem making conversion…a no-brainer. By also creating content that’s grounded in my case studies, when I put out a bite-sized piece of content, I can redirect it to a fully fleshed-out thought and approach they would self-identify with.

To this day only 3 of 16 prospects didn’t buy TheBrandConductor.

Isn’t this the goal of marketing? To convert the ideal client.

I recently read that bragging is one of the most underrated aspects of converting prospects into clients…

But regarding my above-mentioned experiences, showing the application of what worked is also a part of that strategy.

So if the marketing isn’t based on various aspects of the work, how else do you expect to strengthen the brand?

This is where content in Trinidad and Tobago (for many potential clients like myself) takes a nosedive being “just about going viral”. Oftentimes you’ll hear content creators complain about going viral being all their clients care about. Evidently, when you’re just cutting your teeth in marketing your services, a circumstance of that situation is not knowing any better. But “if the data doesn’t lie” then a poor conversion strategy is rooted in 99% of businesses being fearful of branding their services.

The illusion of a brand is a lot easier to sell. Just weave pretty colors and fonts around a few sound blips — like putting lipstick on a fish and calling it a mermaid. A marketing problem is what you’ll have on your hands when you don’t prioritize the process that comes before the marketing.

Read: What This Problem In Your Sales Funnel Reveal

Getting your client from point A to B is a journey you have to be dedicated to fleshing out for yourself BEFORE you can help them in their journey with their clients.

Read: How To Say “Pay Me” When People Try To Trick — Whoops, I Mean “Pick Your Brain”

I hope this article prompts you to reconsider how you approach content creation. Beyond mere attraction, focus on how the full-length source is converting your ideal clients into clients.