You probably see a lot of marketing from your competitors. Especially if you're active online.

Linkedin posts, Facebook Ads, sometimes even Google Ads.

And you might have noticed that quite a lot of it seems to involve rather a lot of hype.

In my case, I see competitors saying that if you buy their stuff you can skyrocket your business within weeks, get floods of new clients, grow revenue by some astronomical (but always strangely odd-numbered and pinpoint accurate) percentage.

And I look at what I know about them and their products and I think “My products are better than theirs – should I be making big outrageous claims too?”

You might be thinking the same thing too about copying the hypey marketing styles that are so prevalent.

I'd avoid it.

My experience is that hypey marketing works: but it attracts the wrong sort of person.

My ideal clients are experienced business people. They may need some help with marketing or sales, but they're not new to business and they've been around the block a bit in life.

That means they're naturally a little bit skeptical and a bit worldly-wise. If they read some exaggerated claim with skimpy proof, it's going to turn them off rather than excite them.

The type of people who respond to hypey marketing tend to be a bit more gullible. Or a bit more desperate. Neither make great clients in my experience.

I'm guessing your ideal clients are probably more like mine than the ones attracted by hypey marketing. 

They respond much better to being treated with respect.

As David Ogilvy famously said, “The customer is not a moron. She's your wife.”

Smart clients see through hype.

So when we're looking at those outrageous claims and thinking “how can I compete with that?”, remember that real clients don't believe them. Real clients – by and large – are turned off by hype.

So let's keep things real. Let's proudly tell clients what they'll get from working with us – but without hype and exaggeration.

For the best clients, it works.