Walk in the shoes of your customer. Always.

The foundation for driving an effective Marketing Machine isn't rocket science. For me, it's simply using coming sense: Think, breathe, eat, sleep, talk and walk from the shoes of your customer. Period. It's that easy.

As a marketer, the words I use to convey a message or engage an audience come naturally by simply stepping into the shoes of my targeted audience and viewing my content from a customer perspective. Imagine this:

If you were a potential customer who visited your website, would your key messages immediately resonate? What, if any, would be your gut, emotional-response? What would be your number one takeaway? Would you be enticed to continue reading? Would you trust your company? What catches your eye? What turns you off, if anything? Are you confused about anything? You only have about 8 seconds to make your judgement. What do you remember after an 8 second glance?

If you haven't done this before, try it. It works remarkably well when collaborating with your corporate team on messaging, positioning and key value propositions.

p.s. Top Secret: This approach totally rocks when trying to convince a room full of engineers and developers that customers really don't care about how awesome you think your product is - even though it is. It's about them, their needs and pain, not you. Viewing your suggested marketing-speak from the outside-in as opposed to the inside-out forces the brains behind the technology to think outside their sandbox.