Little wonder this marketing communications strategy caper is often thought to be a bit of a raffle.
The key to understanding lies in this simple fact: in general, people in general don't care and in particular, your beloved target audience doesn’t care.
You see, they get bombarded with 3,000 ads every day. There are the hundreds of businesses selling their wares in your average Yellow Pages category. Not to mention the 40,000 items they see when they wander through their local supermarket.
Add to this the fact that as you place that all important advertisement, post that beautifully crafted direct mail piece or make that critical sales call, what you're actually doing is interrupting your target audience as they get on with, what they would consider to be, more meaningful endeavours.
And to top things off, you're probably not the only business offering what you're offering, so you'd be justified in thinking "Why #*%#@ bother?!"
Well, you've got every reason to bother. The fact is, marketing, advertising and promotions are a fact of life. The trick is to make your marketing communications strategy engaging to your target audience. You see it's all about getting the message and the medium, just so.
And I strongly believe that the message is where it all starts. So here are some tips on getting clarity around what to say:
- Create your elevator speech – It needs to be able to be said in three seconds and encourage further enquiry. Tooheys makes the world more social. 1800-Got-Junk unclutters peoples’ lives. The response you’re looking for is “That's interesting, tell me more.” It’s at that point you can step out of the elevator and rattle on about the more specific parts of your business that are so dear to your heart.
- Identify your Core Values – Knowing what’s important becomes so much simpler if you know what you stand for. Conversely, anytime you have difficulty making an important decision it’s the result of being unclear about your values.
- Be single-minded – My days in advertising taught me that communication works best when one piece of information is told well. Any more and the mind starts to panic! So the question to ask is “What’s the single most important thing I can tell my target audience that will encourage them to do business with me?” Follow this up with “Why should they believe me?” and you’re on your way to message clarity.
I’m sure there are many other points on gaining message clarity, but I’ve already gone two over quota.
The bottom-line? Take care in the development of your business message and marketing communications strategy and your target audience might just take care when reading it.
“ The trick is to make your marketing communications strategy engaging to your target audience. ”
Tim Reid and Luke Moulton are the hosts of the Small Business Big Marketing Show that discusses how other small business owners from around the world go about their marketing. It's fun, entertaining and always full of helpful ideas and insights for you to apply to your business....immediately!
