Pritchett shares marketing tips with Martin Business Association members

Elizabeth Pritchett offered marketing strategies for Martin Business Association members during this month's meeting.

By Lorcan McCormick

Associate Editor

At Tuesday’s Martin Business Association gathering, Elizabeth Pritchett spoke before an audience to share marketing strategies and holiday planning for businesses. A diverse gaggle ranging from employment agency representatives to business owners to insurance agents listened to Pritchett's seminar, which held a strong focus on grabbing and holding customer's attention. 

In a humorous anecdote Pritchett used, as a poor example, the following, “marketing has changed. When I was thinking about this, you know those people who would stand by Regions Bank yelling at people you know you're going to hell and this sort of thing, they catch your attention but you don't really see people pulling up a chair to listen. It's almost offensive because you're driving by and you hear people yelling at ya, and that's how marketing used to be. It used to be shouting ‘I have this product, I have this service, come by.’ That doesn't work anymore. Now we have to shift toward storytelling, on connections.”

Pritchett's talk used a series of slides to make examples of styles of modern marketing, making a particular focus on reels and ways of video marketing to customers. She also used a repeating slide of numbers, which would circle back toward the end of the talk, as an example of repetition to draw audience attention toward a subject. 

“There are a couple of components that make for a good quality post – the first is a scroll-stopping image. Image is the first thing that makes someone stop their scroll. You are competing with thousands of pieces of content, just because people follow you doesn't mean people see your content, so you have to give them a reason to stop and see and engage with your content.” In a remark later given to The Post about specifically designing quality print advertising Pritchett said, “anytime you can use pictures of people in ads, it'll connect with people more. Real pictures of people will always make people more interested in what it is.”

Later, in explaining the repeating slide on the screen at the Martin Event Center during the presentation, Pritchett elucidated it was a countdown timeline to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas to place in perspective the time remaining to those three major spending holidays. Pritchett later asked the attendees to participate in a competition that asked them to take various holidays which were presented and create quick marketing ideas for them. 

Pritchett again stressed the importance of storytelling for modern marketing, stressing realness and homeliness was more at a premium than sharp professionalism in drawing audience response. In another comment to The Post after the seminar, when asked about whether business owners should invest in video-editing training, Pritchett responded in the affirmative, “investing in yourself and your employees is one of the best and smartest decisions you can make.”

Landy Fuqua, Director of the University of Tennessee at Martin Regional Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Center and the Tennessee Small Business Development Center, gave these remarks in regards to the MBA and its mission, “the MBA provides great resources to our businesses and this year we have tried really hard to bring relative content and training to our members. We would love for any businesses in Martin who are not currently participating to join us at our next meeting in October.”