4 Valuable Lessons From Shark Tank

Do you love watching Shark Tank? The innovative ideas entrepreneurs present and the sharks drilling presenters with questions are entertaining.

Shark Tank is a fun show for a lot of reasons, but if you’re paying attention, it’s also providing you with some valuable marketing nuggets. Here are four marketing lessons you can learn from Shark Tank...

Focus on Benefits, Not Features

Over a few episodes, you will start to see a trend. The sharks, and particularly Kevin O’Leary, can get pretty testy with presenters that talk about how great their product is.

Nobody cares. What you need to talk about is what problems you can solve for your customer, such as saving them time or money, or making a frustrating task easier. A pitch that says your product is the best or the first to do something is not what is most important to consumers.

Know Your Numbers

A potentially squirm-worthy moment on Shark Tank is when the sharks start asking about revenue, cost-to-produce and other hard numbers. You can’t help hoping the entrepreneur is ready with hard facts.

Maybe you won’t get a chance to go on Shark Tank, but it’s likely you’ll get an opportunity to ask a board or an investor for more marketing dollars, so be ready to back up your claims on why investing in marketing makes sense. Without solid data, you’re just sharing an opinion.

Develop SMART Goals

You’ve witnessed the moment on Shark Tank when an entrepreneur tosses out a revenue projection and five sets of eyebrows shoot up in disbelief and often annoyance. Pie-in-the-sky projections have no place in your marketing goals.

Goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. In marketing, it is essential that you designate specific metrics for goals like “increase brand awareness” and “build customer engagement” and that you have a clear idea of what types of metrics actually contribute to growth.

Get Specific

Marketing designed to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to nobody. It gets lost in the noise.

Marketing teams are often afraid to specialize their messaging because they are afraid they will miss opportunities, but there are great reasons to be specific:

• You will be more effective at identifying the pain points of a segment of your audience, rather than trying to address everyone who could possibly ever use your product.
• You will build your reputation as an expert. When someone needs information about your industry, they will remember how you did a deep dive into their topic in a blog post or a podcast episode.
• Your brand will become synonymous with solving a particular problem, similar to the way entrepreneurs who want to sell on QVC immediately turn their body toward Lori Greiner.

What may be most notable about Shark Tank is the sharp differences in enthusiasm and dismissal that you see in the sharks at times. One shark is ready to jump in, while another immediately says, “I’m out.” You’ll never appeal to everyone, so don’t let that keep you from making connections with those interested in your brand.

While Shark Tank has some valuable marketing lessons, you may still need help implementing them. That’s where DirectMail.io comes in. Contact us to learn how our automated marketing solution helps you spend less time on manual marketing tasks and more time growing your business.