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If you’re a founder, there is one marketing lesson you MUST get tattooed. It’s 5 words long and it will change the way you look at your marketing – and everything else about your business – forever.

Hey macha! Welcome back to Domination HQ where we use gamer psychology to build growth engines. Today we’re gonna look at how you can get your customers to pay attention to what you have to say. It’s a simple thing, and you can start applying the technique as soon as you are done watching this video.

If you’re running your own business, you want your customers to care about what you’re saying and pay attention to your “marketing”.

That’s pretty much the way any business survives. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to get a foothold in a small niche or dominate a massive market – you need to get your customers to give a shit about you.

Because, that’s when they click on the ads, spend their money or hit the subscribe button and tap the bell icon on YouTube.

Get it?

But, this is easier said than done. And there’s 3 reasons why:

1. First off, there’s just Too Much Competition! And I don’t mean from just the other 17 million people who’re doing what you’re doing. It’s from other things too. Anything that takes attention away from you and your message is competition. Netflix is competition. Their 4 year old is competition. Their boss shouting at them for not filing the TPS reports is competition.
2. Number two is a fundamental lack of trust. Almost everyone who’s selling something is busy talking about how awesome they are and how superb their products are. Ridiculous claims, clickbait and a continuous stream self absorbed marketers has made people – not wary, but apatheic. They’ve just stopped caring.
3. But macha, that’s not all. As a founder, you don’t have the best levers of influence at your disposal.
   • You don’t have the authority to make people listen.
   • You don’t have the Social Proof to reflect trust.
   • Any attempts you make at a “quid pro quo” don’t work, because your customers are not paying attention.
   Even if you had these levers, your messaging does not resonate.

And, trust me – this is an absolutely horrible place to be.

I call it Schrodinger’s Success. It’s when you have just enough success to keep trying, but not enough success to be successful. This is a horrible place to be because it’s where hope lives.

Hope that your message will work this time.

That this new design and ad copy will click.

That this time, it’ll be different.

That’s insanity.

And this insanity deludes you into wasting some of the most valuable resources you have – time, emotional energy and money by going after something that doesn’t work.

You and I both know what that means – Game Over.

All because you couldn’t keep someone’s attention.

But….

Did you know that there’s been an industry that’s been gaining popularity since the 1970s – and they’re absolutely amazing at one thing – getting and keeping over 2.7 billion people’s attention?

No. Not advertising.

It’s video games!

Video games are so damn successful because they turn people into hero of their own adventures and enable them to live out their fantasies.

In a video game, I can do things that I can’t do in real life.

I can shoot zombies, run a marathon or, if I was feeling particularly adventurous, roll around a giant sticky ball.

Video games work because they make me the hero.

And for founders like you, that’s the biggest takeaway – make your customer the hero.

Don’t make your product the hero. Make the customer the hero.

Whatever you’re saying and wherever you’re saying it, reframe it from your customer’s perspective and put them in the center of the whole thing.

And then, call them on an adventure. Take them on a fantastic journey into an exciting new world. Acknowledge their problems, empathize and become their mentor who gives them awesome loot and powerups to defeat their own villains!

When you build a narrative like this, it resonates with your customers. It also builds up your levers of influence.

People start paying attention because you’re now talking about the most important person in the room – themselves. And they start liking you more for it.

Now, if you’ve built this narrative properly, you start priming people’s behaviour as well. They will want to do the stuff that the hero’s doing – and they’ll come to you for help to defeat their own villains. That’s because the human need for internal consistency kicks in – “People like us do things like this”. They want to start acting like the hero they identify with.

Smart eh?

In the end, a proper brand story where your customer’s the hero acts like a solid multiplier for your marketing success. And that’s how you make money 🙂

This leads us to the five words every founder must get tattooed.. but before that, let me ask you a question. Did you find this content useful? Is it something that you can use in your outreach efforts – immediately? If so, click on the subscribe button and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss any more content like this from me!

And now, before we get to the tattoo, let’s quickly summarize. You gotta remember three things:

1. Your business is doomed unless your customer cares enough to listen.
2. The best way to get them to care is to make them the hero of your story whenever you’re talking to them.
3. Show them the adventure they can go on and how they can defeat their own villains!

And the five word tattoo?

Your customer is the hero.

That’s it.

This is Arvindh saying with love from Bengaluru – over and out.