At Your Marketing Lab, we offer a free email course that’s all about how to create a consistent core message that resonates with your ideal customer or client. Why is this important? We are so over-marketed to these days (you might have noticed), that only the clearest, most compelling messages make it through – and even more importantly – move us to action. Below are a few of the main points covered in that course, summarized?
1. Marketing is really about a continuous conversation you are having with your customers, prospects, vendors, and partners. In fact, every point of contact your business has with the outside world is marketing some message. Further, these conversations are either helping your business succeed or fail. Great marketing involves incorporating a core message into every one of these conversions.
2. When creating this very important core message, you must understand very well who you are communicating to. Further, you must understand who your unique client is ideal and cater your message directly to them. Create a system of continuous market research that involves surveys, paying attention to what they read, what they watch, what they love and what they are frustrated by and not interested in. Read their web sites, read what they are reading, subscribe to their newsletters, and join their associations. Talk with them – and even more important – listen.
3. In order for your core message to be meaningful to your ideal clients, there must be a strong point of differentiation within it. One of the best ways to differentiate yourself is to find something your competitors are not doing that your customers would find valuable. Or, find something your competitors are doing that your customers find annoying. Differentiate with that, but never with price. Remember – you can match your competition in every way, as long as you differentiate on one thing that matters to your ideal client.
4. Communicate your core message from a “benefits” rather than “features” perspective. None of us purchases anything because of the features of that product or service. We purchase because of what the features of that product or service do for us. More importantly – we purchase because of what we perceive the features of that product or service will do for us. Perception, as always, is king. Even more important: How we think about a product or service not only drives our purchasing decisions, it also shapes our expectations about that product or service and influences how committed we are to enjoying the product or service and getting value from it.
5. Some questions to help you on your quest of discovering the real benefits your ideal customers are looking for: What are your ideal customers really looking for? What do they really want? What do they really need? What are they already looking for? What do your products or services do that can deliver on those desires? Those are the benefits. Those are the hot buttons of your core message and they will have little to do with the actual features of your product or service. As long as your product or service delivers on what they really want, the actual product or service is incidental. So here’s the big take-away: Don’t craft your marketing message around what’s incidental. Craft it around what is desired.
That’s why, in Denver this Saturday, January 24th; we are bringing you a complete Marketing Strategy Blueprint Workshop. And we are bringing it to you for under $200. (If you’re not in Denver, we apologize. Stay tuned – we may be coming to your city soon and may also attempt an online version of this workshop. If either of these options is appealing to you, it would help us out a great deal if you let us know.)
If you are in Denver, this is a workshop you can’t afford to miss.
In this new economy, having a good marketing strategy is not just important – it’s essential. This Saturday, we’ll help you map out a Strategic plan – a Blueprint – for the rest of the year. Click on the link to read more. 9thnm.hosts.cx