How Marketing is Like Captain Planet

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Do you remember the old cartoon Captain Planet and the Planeteers? It was a show back in the 90s about five teenagers who could combine their powers to summon their own personal superhero. Their goal was to “take pollution down to zero”. And as far as the fictional world, they did a pretty good job.

Marketing is a lot like Captain Planet. You need to combine all of your resources to be successful. Doing one thing well isn’t going to optimize your strategy. You want to do everything well. All of your superpowers need to come together to create the best marketing strategy that your team can put together.

Let’s take a look at how this old cartoon and your marketing efforts are alike. The similarities may surprise you.

Fire – Unique Selling Proposition

Your fire is your unique selling proposition. What makes your product or service different? What makes it better? And why should anyone care?

This is your fire. This is the excitement your prospects have been waiting on. Don’t disappoint them. The unique selling proposition needs to hit your customers hard. It needs to put a fire in their belly.

If you can’t motivate your customers, if you don’t have that fire, nothing else you do will matter. You’ll be just another product or service lost in the abyss.

Think about Wal-Mart. “Save money, live better”. Or M&Ms. “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”.

These aren’t just slogans, they’re unique selling propositions that stick with people on the long-term. What can you do to make you USP stand out and turn it into something that will stay in your prospects’ and customers’ minds and hearts?

Water – SEO

Search engine optimization has become a huge part of marketing in today’s world.

Your on-page SEO is one of the few things that you have complete control over, so it needs to be on point from the jump. SEO is like water. It’s fluid.

Your efforts need to flow. Your content needs to hit prospects who are in various places in the sales funnel. Marketing is about touching the right people at the right time. You need to have something for everyone.

SEO gives you the opportunity to do just that with your blog content and your interlinking skills. Keyword research can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s not about what you want people to search for, it’s about what people are already searching for.

Peppering your content with the right keywords along with creating the best content in your industry will help to give you a leg up on any and all competition. This is why your blog, content, and keyword research should be a big part of your strategy.

Earth – Humility

While technically not a marketing strategy, humility is really important to your efforts. You want to be the best, you know you’re the best, but you still need to be humble.

The best way to accomplish this goal is to place a focus on why you do what you do. Marketing is all about finding your target customer, right?

What do you do once you find them? You have to romance the prospect. They have a problem and they’re in desperate need of finding someone who can help them with a solution. You, your product or service, or your company are that solution.

Don’t hesitate to explain to the prospect why you want to help them. Why is your product so great and why is it so perfect?

As a marketing professional, you must be prepared to answer the hard questions. Explaining why your company is in the business it’s in is a great way to break the ice and show off some humility.

Wind – Social Media

The internet is a place where your content is really only visible for a handful of minutes. Your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts are just a few ships passing in the wind. Tweets have by far the shortest lifespan, clocking in at around 15 minutes.

Knowing this might turn you off. But social media is a gold mine if you know how to use it. The trick to using social networks is to understand that each post is fleeting, just a butterfly puttering past you as you move down the sidewalk to your next appointment.

So how does social media fit into your marketing scheme? First, you should place your focus on just a few networks. Pick 3-4 that suit your needs. The second part of your strategy is all about posting. You need to post often, as in several times a day. But you don’t want to post your content and just your content. You want to share the most relevant information to help your customers flow through the sales funnel with a variety of content from many different sources who are trustworthy and authoritative in the industry.

Heart – Customer Service

Like Ma-Ti, the teenager who possessed the heart ring in the show, some of you might be thinking about how customer service impacts your marketing plans?

As a kid, I always thought the heart character was always kind of worthless. He wasn’t strong. His ring couldn’t do much on its own. But the team was incomplete without him. They needed his ring to summon Captain Planet. It didn’t matter how strong the other characters were on their own if they couldn’t get the main hero to come out and kick some butt.

Customer service is the key to retaining customers. Issues come up and products or services may not perform as intended. Or people may just not know how to use them properly. Keeping a top-notch customer service team is great. But this is also part of a marketers job. Check out this article for more information on the topic.

You need to make yourself available to your customers and clients to help whenever they need it.

The Takeaway

Marketing has never been, and will never be, an attack with just a single prong.

However, on the flip side of this, you can’t bombard them with offers and emails or else it will annoy your prospects.

You need to find that happy medium. Have a plan in place for how and when you want to contact prospects and what you want to offer them.

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