How to Strengthen Your Marketing Message
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- Category: Marketing, Marketing Research, Marketing Strategies
If you have been following us, you know who your target market is, what their needs are, what their purchase behaviors are and how to reach them. You also know how to use market research to find out more information about your market on a regular basis.
Now, let’s look at how to write targeted messages for your target market that support your marketing strategies.
Today we’re going to take your market research and use it to create a powerful marketing message. The strength of your marketing message lies in its ability to speak to the specific needs and desires of your target market and tap into their emotional reactions, also known as emotional switches. When you address those emotional switches, you motivate your audience to take action. The more people you can motivate to take action, the more leads you’ll gain and the more sales you’ll close.
This blog post will cover the following:
- How a strong marketing message will supercharge your lead generation
- Examples of strong marketing messages
- A step-by-step process for developing your unique marketing message
- Strategies that will strengthen your existing marketing message
- How to test and measure the strength of your message
- How to be consistent with your strong marketing message
A strong marketing message will make a massive difference in your lead generation strategies.
A marketing message is simply a statement or phrase that you use to communicate information about your business to others. A strong marketing message will do four things:
- Speak to the reader’s needs, desires or problems we call emotional switches
- Offer a solution, advantage or benefit
- Describe a point to educate your audience
- Motivate the reader to take action
As we said earlier, the key here is to motivate your target audience to do something after they read or hear the message. It needs to be strong enough to entice the audience to ask for more information, visit the website, pick up the phone or walk into the store. You will put your marketing message on every piece of marketing material your business uses for lead generation, so it must be powerful and consistent and speak to the group of people that you have identified as your ideal customers. Strengthening your marketing message has the potential to dramatically increase your lead generation before you even change your existing strategies. In these times, when Covid-19 is making all businesses rush to get online, it is crucial for business owners to understand their market first and use the internet as a tool. The fundamentals are not changing.
Here are some examples of strong marketing messages used by successful businesses.
You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less — or it’s free!
The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
With Your Wardrobe There Is Always A Way.
We’ll pick you up.
Keeping Wisdom At Home.
When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
More Leads, More Customers, More Profit, More Time.
We guarantee that you will have a comfortable experience and never have to wait more than 15 minutes or you will receive a free examination.
Get Found Quicker.
Let’s get started with the process you can use to create a new marketing message for your business. You can also use it to refine the marketing message you already have.
Work through the following questions to brainstorm and record the aspects of your business that you will communicate in your marketing message. Take your time and be as detailed as possible.
1. Use all the information you gathered about your target market to figure out what your customer’s emotional switches (needs or wants) are.
Write down who your ideal customers are, and what their problems, desires and needs are. Take some time to revisit the behavioral and psychographic information you gathered when researching your target market. This will give you an idea of what kind of emotional switches you should focus on when creating your marketing message. Emotional triggers motivate your potential customers to take action. Some common emotional switches are: price, location, exclusivity, results, safety, timeliness, convenience and atmosphere.
3. Think about the outcome of the value or solution that you provide.
Brainstorm what happens when your customers receive the value or benefit of your product or service. What specifically happens? Are they thrilled? Relieved of worry? Do they have more time to spend with their families, or do they put dinner on the table faster?
This is similar to the storytelling aspect of creating your marketing message. One way or another, paint a picture of how you will improve the lives of your customers.
5. What is the perception you would like others to have about your business?
How you want your customers to perceive you will impact the way you describe your offerings in your marketing message as well as the kind of language you will use. Revisit the vision you created and write down some ideas about the image you want your business to project to the outside world. For example, if your business is completely transforming its operations to become more environmentally sustainable, you will need to use different language and emphasize different features and benefits than you did before.
7. Using descriptive language, synthesize your paragraph into a single sentence of 15 words or less.
This sentence will become your unique marketing message!
We know how challenging this part of the process can be. To make it easier, we usually suggest writing a few different sentences that emphasize different things to give yourself options to choose from. For example, if you’re not sure whether to feature your company’s commitment to unbelievable prices or its customer satisfaction guarantee, write one sentence for each and compare them to see which is stronger. Aim to have two or three sentences that you’re happy with, and then test them out to see which is the most effective. Always remember to follow the Test-Measure-Adopt approach: test your choices, measure the results, and adopt the best-performing marketing message.
2. Describe the value or benefit that your product or service offers your customers.
This is what your customers get when they spend money at your business – the answer to “What’s in it for me?” How do you solve their problems? How do you meet their needs or fulfill their desires? For example, imagine you’re a grocery store in a neighborhood. You offer the convenience of being just a short stroll away instead of a car ride. When you’re thinking about this question, think about your product or service in the context of the benefits, results, or advantages customers receive, instead of the features you offer.
4. What is your company’s point of differentiation? What makes you stand out from the competition? Educate them.
Your point of differentiation – or uniqueness – is something you will want to strongly feature in your marketing message. It is the reason that the reader should choose your business instead of your competition. For this step, do some research on your competition and see what kinds of marketing messages they are using. How strong are those messages? What benefits and results do they promise? If you are having trouble figuring out what sets you apart from your competition, think about including an irresistible offer or a strong guarantee to give yourself an edge. You can use powerful offers and risk reversal strategies like guarantees.
6. Based on the notes you wrote in response to the above questions, summarize the information into a paragraph of 4 to 5 sentences.
If you’ve got pages of notes, this may be a challenging part of the process, but that’s okay – it means you have a lot to work with. Take your time and wade through your notes bit by bit. You may want to start by writing 10-15 sentences, and then narrow those down to 4-5 sentences when you have a better idea of what specifically you want to focus on. Or you could try writing three sentences for each question, and then working to synthesize from that point. Keep in mind that the most effective marketing messages use strong, descriptive language that triggers emotional responses. Think about how you would describe your point of difference or value-added service to a close friend, and write with that in mind.
The only way to find out the strength of your marketing message is to test it. Don’t be afraid of making some mistakes – you need to get feedback!
Test your three draft marketing messages internally first.
Before you go out to the public with your drafts, test them on your friends, family, staff and colleagues first. Use their feedback constructively, but don’t be afraid to stand up for elements that you believe are effective or important. Once you have gathered enough feedback, rework your draft messages and incorporate the suggestions you believe are valuable.
Incorporate feedback, and then test a few draft messages externally.
When you have refined your draft messages and incorporated staff and colleague feedback, you can start to test the messages out on your audience. This doesn’t have to be complicated or cost a lot of money. Simple tests using small-scale distributions will give you the information you need to determine which message is the most effective. For example, place two or three ads in the local newspaper – one a week, with a different message each time – and compare the number of leads each ad generates. Or, send out a small direct mail campaign, with the materials split into three groups: one for each message.
The message that generates the most leads is the strongest, and it will be the one you choose to be your business’ unique marketing message.
Now that you’ve got your best message, use it consistently on all of your marketing materials and in all of your campaigns.
Consistency and repetition are powerful persuasive tools to reinforce your message over time. Ensuring your marketing message appears on all documents related to your business will build your brand image and your company’s reputation.
Make a list of all marketing materials, stationery, signage and internal and external documentation that your ideal customers and clients will come in contact with. Then, incorporate your marketing message onto each of them.
Here’s a suggested list of materials to include:
- Website
- Online Ads
- Artificial Intelligence
- Advertisements
- Direct Mail
- Listings
- Phone Messages
- Email Signature
- Business Cards
- Letterhead
Now that you know what you’re going to say, and who you’re going to say it to, take actions toward speaking your customer’s Language. If you’d like a more in-depth exploration of the process, we have provided more details in our book, Speak Your Customers’ Language: 5 Steps to Turn Prospects into Long-Term Paying Customers.
Let’s dive into some lead generation strategies.
In the next blog, we will dive into some lead generation strategies that you can start implementing in your business right away. Our focus is to set up lead generation strategies that will either immediately run themselves or run themselves over time, so you can generate more leads with less investment of time or finances.
Devoted to your business growth,
When you don’t know where you are going, look where you came from.