Your marketing message has to be crystal clear to be effective. But it cannot simply lay out a list of features and benefits. It must evocatively demonstrate the path from pain to solution that feels both tangible and hopeful to your customer. If you cannot do that well, you will lose them before you even get to “hello.”
It is my belief that a muddled marketing message is the core reason most small businesses fail in 1-2 years. Very few entrepreneurs understand how to translate what they do into a compelling conversation with their customers. This partially due to how close owners are to their own offerings, and partially due to a lack of marketing knowledge. Regardless, the saddest part of all this is that fixing the marketing message is usually not only easy to do, it is reinvigorating to the entire company’s enthusiasm for how they serve their customers.
There are three key ways marketing messages get muddled:
The saddest part of all this is that fixing the marketing message is usually not only easy to do, it is reinvigorating to the entire company’s enthusiasm for how they serve their customers.
No One Buys Ideas
Customers don’t buy love, joy, freedom, happiness or beauty on principle.
They buy the Golden Trifecta: Before, After and Transformation.
Customers want a “before and after” scenario they believe they can achieve for themselves. They buy pictures and stories of real people they believe are like them, who struggle with the same challenges, and made the leap to transformation. Seeing someone else be successful is what motivates purchase; hence, the power of the testimonial, the case study, and those omnipresent “before and after” photos.
Never become so enchanted with the transformation you create for people that you skip the crucial step of expressing what life was like before your product or service came along. While it is tempting to only focus on the positive, it ends up feeling unrealistic. If you are able to present a clear story of what before (pre-you) felt like, and that as a result of using your product or service, how a customer can get everything they are wanting for themselves, then they will happily pay for that experience.
This is just as true for Snickers as it is for coaching. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t even have to feature a real person. It only needs to show the Golden Trifecta: Before, after, transformation. Hungry and angry, when a Snickers bar is applied, becomes transformed into happy and likable once more.
So, if your copy is vague and uses a lot of glowing and idealistic language about how a customer will feel after using your product or service, take a step back – you have skipped two crucial talking points and lost your audience before you begin. Identify the pain before the transformation; state the pain in an empathetic way. Paint a picture of the process that addresses that pain, then (and only then) talk about the transformation in those glowing terms.
The Feature Benefit Trap
Practical business owners love to discuss their innovative and powerful features and benefits, which are, arguably, extremely important. There is a time and a place for features and benefits, which help a customer to understand the process of using the product or service. However, it cannot be stated strongly enough how important it is to resist the temptation to hide behind a list of features and benefits.
Dependence on features and benefits to drive your marketing content turns you into a commodity, endlessly battling over price. If you feel commoditized, the first and only place you are going to need to look is the emphasis is you place on features and benefits.
The path out of commoditization is lies in effective use of emotion and the promise of an end to suffering. Typically, the commoditized company believes their customers can (and should?) make the connection between a particular benefit and the emotion that will create. Customers have proven they really are not that interested in making that leap on behalf of a company that wants their business. Your marketing message must go the last mile for them, or risk them making a leap in a direction of their own choosing.
The easiest and best question you can ask yourself is, “Why do they care?”
Let’s say a house has a garage, which is connected to the house (feature) so the family can stay out of the weather, getting in and out of their car in a lit, enclosed environment (benefit). The emotions of “safety” and “comfort” are the answer to “Why do they care?” Your customers aren’t buying the garage. They are buying the safety and comfort. Help them to those feelings and you stop being a commodity.
Broad Appeal Appeals to No One
I hate that this has to be said, but it does. Limiting your portfolio of products and services is important. More important is being extremely precise about whom you are targeting as your customer. If you are not clear on whom your real customer is then it is impossible to address them specifically enough for them to felt known.
Additionally, if you tell yourself that everyone can benefit from your product or service (and they might) then you are placing your company in the untenable position of trying to blanket every media channel with a marketing message for every demographic. Good luck with the time and financial investment that will require. The result will, almost certainly, be crickets in response, because you tried to be all things to all people and as a result, you served none.
Better to begin by focusing on one segment of your market and connect powerfully with them, and then keep adding on. The key to your success will always be your focus.
Scattered, Smothered and Covered
Changing strategic direction, executive leadership, or just refocusing initiatives can create and inconsistent marketing message scattered across a number of media platforms. Different target audiences, talking points, features, benefits and even offerings are left like forgotten wreckage across the internet on websites, social platforms and promotional materials. The result is confusion for new customers.
Strategies and direction can change. Be certain to clean up after yourself when they do. Check every web page, every social media channel, every listing, every affiliation and line up your logos, bios, imagery, and talking points. This is good for clarity, and it is also good for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization – or, organic online visibility). If you don’t do this, you are invisible, with your real identity smothered and covered in a lot of old, irrelevant and often incorrect messaging which undermines your current brand.
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