Online Marketing and Your Marketing Message

If you read my earlier hub on marketing (which is sort of a part 1 of this hub) you'll remember that we discussed 3 essential components to marketing. As a quick refresher, they were (in no particular order)...

1. your market (your audience)
   
2. your message (your value proposition)
3. your media (your method of communication)

In this installment, we are going to focus on the message.

Your Marketing Message

What is the desired end result for creating marketing messages?

Forget branding. Forget image. We're interested in only ONE thing. Making money.

To grow your business, it means you needs leads and sales. Period. Forget everything else for a moment and think about this ONE point.

Your marketing messages, to be effective, need to create a response. And the desired response, being trackable, means you can TEST how effective your marketing messages are in getting folks to take the action you'd like them to take.

Now, a word of caution. This isn't about manipulation. Or scamming people.

We're assuming that you actually have something valuable to offer people. That you have a quality product or service that actually solves someone's problem. Okay?

Three Components of Your Marketing Message

There are three points we want to cover briefly that will improve and help your marketing messages actually do what they are supposed to do, which is to get more leads for your business and to close more sales for your business.

The first issue to understand is that you need to speak a language that your potential customer, client, or patient will understand and will respond to.

What this means is that you have to turn the focus away from yourself and on their needs, their wants and their desires.

The second issue that you have to understand with your marketing message is that you have to use language that speaks about your benefits and not your features.

You've probably heard this one a million times, but it's worth repeating. A feature is what you, your product or your service does. For example, your product might whiten teeth.

A benefit is what it does for other people in the way of solving a problem. Your product makes people more attractive because they now have shiny white teeth.

Too often business owners think they are talking about benefits, when really they are just lining up feature, after feature, after feature.

At the end of the day, benefit driven copy, copy that speaks about solving someone's problem, will always get a better response than just an endless laundry list of your particular features.

And finally, when you are creating and crafting a marketing message, it has to pass the "so what" test.

For example, if you received your own marketing message in the mail, or by email, or through a phone call, or if you read an ad in the paper, or whatever method you are using to communicate your marketing messages, just ask yourself this one question:

"Is this something I would interrupt my busy schedule to pay attention to? And maybe respond to?"

Be honest with yourself.

If your marketing messages are full of "me tooism", "same old, same old", "like everybody else", it is going to get ignored.

And that's just bad news.

Remember Your Call to Action

And finally, to generate a response you must ask your audience to take an action. And this is called a "call to action."

Your marketing messages must end by asking your market to take some measurable action, like...

1. calling a toll free number
2. visiting a website
3. faxing in an order form
   

It doesn't have to be fancy. It can be as simple as, "Call Now" and a phone number, "email us at", and "visit our website".

For doing offline marketing for my merchant account providers business, the call to action is for people to fax in their most recent merchant account statement for a no-cost audit.

For my web marketing firm, we usually ask people to sign up for our monthly web tips newsletter, or a free teleseminar to learn a web marketing tip to help them with their online marketing.  

The idea?  Be creative on how you can get folks to start raising their hand.

Just be sure it's track-able. That way, you can test the effectiveness of your marketing messages to refine your sales process.

Whatever you want the person to do, simply ask them to do it. You will be amazed at what people are willing to do if you just ask them reasonably.