Network Marketing – Use Your Own Words

When you share your network marketing products, use your own words. They will sell better than a third-party brochure.From time to time I work with other distributors with my network marketing company who want to build a website and take their business online. Almost every time their biggest challenge with online network marketing is figuring out what to say about the products on their pages and blog posts.
The technical aspects of building a website are easy to learn and master with repetition. They all get beyond those challenges and get very good at it, if they stick with it. How to deal with the challenge of what to say is a lot harder because there isn’t a simple recipe for it.

The thing is, I really don’t understand why it is such a challenge. Most of the people that I have been working with lately have been with the company longer than me (and I’ve been here for ten years), which means that they should be at least as familiar with the products as I am.

Why So Challenging to Come Up With the Words?

One aspect of the challenge that I do understand is that they don’t want to inadvertently make any medical claims. A lot of the products that we deal with are health related and it is easy to cross the line into medical territory, especially when answering a customer’s question. When someone asks you how long your product will take to cure them of their cancer, what can you say? Not much if you don’t want to potentially expose yourself to a lot of legal issues.

Third-Party Marketing Tools

I read a blog post yesterday by a network marketer from another company. She advocated the idea of using only third-party marketing tools and brochures to help you sell your products and business opportunity to your prospects. It’s part of the old-school belief that duplication is the best way to go about building your business. Just ignore the fact that she’s teaching network marketing ideas through a blog, which is NOT usually considered “easily duplicatable” by traditional network marketers.
My issue with using these third-party marketing tools is that they have very limited value. What do you do when your prospective customer has a question that isn’t answered by your brochure? Your customer wants real answers, not hype from a brochure.

Company Marketing Tools

I like the brochures and flyers that our network marketing company creates. They pack a lot of information in them. As good as they are, I still don’t want to rely on them for selling the product. These materials usually contain a lot of specifications. What are the dimensions, how strong is it, what is made from? They don’t contain anything that will create an emotion that will sell the product
Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it. - Sue Grafton Share on X
Think of a laundry detergent commercial you have seen recently on TV. They contain plenty of information about how this detergent will get out grass stains and leave your laundry smelling fresh. What sells the detergent is the image of the kids playing and getting dirty followed by the images of Mom admiring how clean the clothes are and breathing in their freshness.

How to Come Up With the Words

The whole idea behind network marketing is that word-of-mouth sells better than anything else, so use it. Think back to that laundry detergent commercial. Who is going to sell the detergent better, you or some actress paid to smile? If you have used the detergent yourself and liked it, you will. That’s what word-of-mouth is about.
To do that, you need to be able to speak intelligently about your products, and in network marketing your business opportunity is one of your products. That means that you first have to have personal experience with your products, and once you have experience you have to be able to put it into words.

Answer Some Key Questions

  • What does it do?
  • How well does it do what it does?
  • How do you use it?
  • How did it make you feel after you used it?

Those are questions that don’t usually get answered in a company’s brochure. They just tell you what it is. You’re job in network marketing is to answer those questions.

An Example

The best way to see this is with a hypothetical example. Have you heard about the latest technology – heated zipper socks?
The brochure from the company states the available sizes, the material the socks are made from, the length of the zipper, moisture wicking ability, cleaning information, and so on. Most of the brochure is about the patented technology that transforms the friction from zipping the socks into a gentle heat that will warm your feet for an hour. There is also a picture showing a white sock with a zipper running from the big toe to the top of the sock. Pretty cool, huh?
It sounds good. Warm feet on a cool morning is nice. Considering that we are at the end of May as I write this, they probably sound better if you live in the southern hemisphere right now. You still have a some questions though.

  • Are they comfortable with a zipper up the side of your foot all day?
  • How warm will they make my feet?
  • What happens if they get wet?
  • How do they feel?

As a network marketer, these are the things that you need to be able to tell your customers. Maybe your third-party pamphlet will have some testimonials from other people, but your customer is going to ask you what you think of the product. You aren’t going to get that in your pamphlet, and you aren’t going to get a sale if you can’t answer them.
Satisfied customers who will spread word of mouth are the most powerful assets you have. - Andy Sernovitz Share on X

What Are You Going to Say?

You buy a pair of the socks and use them for a week. After that week your are properly prepared to answer the questions.

Wow! I bought my zipper socks a week ago and I love them. Like you, I was concerned about the zipper being comfortable, but I wore them all day and never noticed the zipper even once. Since the heat comes from the zipper I thought that it might get hot too, but the socks do a great job of giving even heat. I don’t know how they do it, but it works. It was actually closer to two hours before I noticed that they weren’t warm anymore.

What if they get wet?

I stepped in a puddle a few days ago and the socks got soaked. I figured that if zipping them creates heat, and heat dries, then they should be able to dry themselves, right?. So I took them off, wrung them out, zipped them up and laid them on a chair. After an hour they were noticeably drier, so I zipped them up again and left them for another hour. The next time I checked them they were completely dry.
I love these socks so much that I ordered a second pair.

That’s what you want to share with your customers, either face-to-face if you do your network marketing offline, or on a page or blogpost if you are an internet network marketer.

What Are You Going to Say?

I hope that helps anyone who doesn’t know what to say about their products. There is no good shortcut to having actual experience with your product.
Right now, I would really appreciate it if you would share your thoughts about what you should say in a comment below and share what I said with your followers on social media.
If you are a network marketer, or thinking about becoming one, and would like to take your business online, I’m creating a free online network marketing e-book to help you do just that.

Disclaimer

I am a network marketer but I don’t sell any heated zipper socks. I made them up. To the best of my knowledge they don’t exist. They sound cool though, right?

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