Content with your content?

Posted: 13th March 2017

Photo

By: Victoria Reece-Heal

Marketing messages are used across such a variety of mediums in business – they are in the words on your website, the posts on your social media, the slogan on your vans, the footers of your emails, the text of your leaflets… so how effective are your marketing messages?

Strong, clear and consistent messages are needed across your business in order to sell yourself to your target audience… to get their attention and guide their actions. Your messages need to be just that – YOUR messages. They should be unique to you as they will be the reason for a customer to engage with your further.

So it’s vital that you have the right messages.

Messages need to be:

  • Engaging
  • Clear
  • To the point
  • Memorable
  • …and evoke the desired reaction (action)!

And here’s how you do it.

The objective of your marketing messages is to grab your target audience’s attention and get them to react in the way you want. To do this you need to be telling them how you will help them and why they should choose you.

  1. Show them you understand them
  2. What are your target audience’s problems or desires
  3. Which do your products or services solve/fulfil?
  4. Show them you can make life better for them
  5. What benefit will you provide
  6. Show them you are special
  7. What makes you unique
  8. How do you differ from your competitors
  9. Show them they can trust you
  10. Evidence of success stories (testimonials)
  11. Evidence of qualifications and accreditations (you are the expert)
  12. Show you are talking direct to them
  13. If you are promoting dog collars, lead (no pun intended!) with: For all dog lovers…
  14. Give them a personalised call to action: Get on the dog and bone! Call us on…

Time to turn your target audience from potential customers to actual customers…

  • Be believable – don’t create expectations you cannot fulfil
  • Focus on the ‘you’ not the ‘we’ – focus on the customer not your business
  • Keep it simple – be concise and to the point (grab attention quickly)
  • Get the right reaction – use imagery and words to evoke emotions and feelings
  • Be versatile – make sure messages can be used across different mediums (professional websites to twitter tweets)
  • Be consistent – use the same messages across your business