Most companies waste enormous amounts of money on Marketing. We all know how mind-numbering it is to spend precious dollars on a new marketing effort that gets no result.
When we see the reports, we wonder what went wrong, or worse, whether our product is really as good as we thought it was.
But what if the problem wasn’t the product? What if the problem was the way we talked about the product?
The fact is pretty marketing tools don’t sell things. Words sell things. And if you clarify your message, your customers will listen.
If we pay a lot of money to an agency without first clarifying our message, we might as well be holding a bullhorn up to a monkey. The only thing a potential customer will hear is a clear message.
The reality is we are not just in a race to get our products to market, we are also in a race to communicate why our customers need those products in their lives. Even if we have the best product in the marketplace, we will lose to an inferior product if our competitor’s offer is communicated more clearly.
So, what is your message? Can you say it easily? Is it simple, relevant, and repeatable? Can your entire team repeat your company’s message in such a way that it is compelling? Have new hires been given talking points they can use to describe what the company offers and why every potential customer should buy it?
All great messages are about survival- either physical, emotional, or spiritual. A message about anything else will not work to captivate an audience. Nobody is interested.
If we position our products or services as anything but an aid in helping people survive, thrive, be accepted, find love, achieve an aspirational identity, or bond with a tribe that will defend them physically and socially, good luck selling anything to anybody. These are the only things people care about.
Even when having to process too much seemingly random information, people begin to ignore the source of that useless information in an effort to conserve calories. In other words, there is a survival mechanism within our customer’s brains that is designed to tune us out should we ever start confusing them.
The key is to make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.
Customers always have questions burning inside them, and if we are not answering those questions, they will move on to another brand.
We should identify what our customer wants, what problem we are helping them solve, and what life after they engage our products and services, for example, we can forget about thriving in the marketplace. Whether we are writing a story or attempting to sell products, our message must be clear. Always. “If you confuse, you’ll lose.”
All experienced writers know the key to great writing is not in what they say, it is in what they don’t say. The more we cut out, the better the screenplay. If we want to connect with customers, we must stop blasting them with noise.
Finally, to clarify our message, we need to organize our thinking, reduce our marketing effort, obliterate confusion, terrify the competition, and finally get our business growing.