Posted by David Bennett
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:17:00 GMT
Your key message is critical to everything you do in your marketing efforts. If you have a great marketing message and combine that with effective promotion, you’ll never have to worry about getting customers again. You’ll have more than you’ll ever want. Once you have developed an effective marketing message you can (should) start to use it in all areas of your marketing such as:
Flyers, advertisements (print, radio, T.V.), business cards, listing presentations, buyer presentation, website, speeches and workshops, daily correspondence, proposals, and brochures.
Basically, any form of external communication will include parts or even your entire marketing message. Even outgoing faxes and your voice mail will use parts of your marketing message.
Posted in Importance of the key message, Develop Key Message
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Posted by David Bennett
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:35:00 GMT
On the Internet, you can set up surveys on your website to gauge what consumers think. If you do not have a website, go to websites that aggregate customer experiences and reviews, like Homethinking.com and others to see what consumers say when they rate agents.
One company set up a discussion list at Topica.com. The results were excellent. Their users had a place in which to share their problems and solutions. And the company had a place where they could listen to their customers and REALLY find out what they wanted. But even without a listserv, there are still many places online where you can listen in to what your customers are saying, thinking and feeling.
Posted in Do Your Own Research, Your Internet Research, What are your service offerings?, Worth your Commission
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Posted by David Bennett
Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:53:00 GMT
Following are some ideas about keeping your value propositions relevant:
- Know your customers. You must know your customers better than your competition and find out what’s really important to people. Discover and leverage their real and emotional needs. Understand that the environment is dynamic and that needs change rapidly. Tool up to track those changes.
- Fit the value proposition(s). Based on customer knowledge, create clear, concise, and relevant value statements fitted directly to specific needs. Positioning and communication are the drivers here.
- Monitor the marketplace. Look for opportunities for new value propositions via early warning techniques and continuous scanning of the marketplace. This will also tell you when existing value propositions are losing impact and wearing out.
- Build products and services which address evolving needs. Address new consumer problems with new value propositions either in the form of new products or services or new benefits for existing products.
- Review pricing. Be sure the commission you ask for is in balance with the value being offered. If the gap between perceived value and commission widens too far, sales will falter. A permanently reduced pricing level in a value-added category signals customers are just buying “value,” not “value-added.”
Whenever you’re trying to market a product, even if the “product” is you, be clear on a few things: who you’re targeting, what they want, and the value you provide that fits those wants. Then, craft a clear “value prop” that hits the target, and keep making changes to keep pace with your changing audience.
Posted in Keep Value Proposition Relevant, Refine Your Messages
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Posted by David Bennett
Mon, 05 Jun 2006 21:39:00 GMT
KEY MARKETING MESSAGE FORMULA
STEP 1 - Identify your target market.
Every successful small business has a target market whether they know it or not. Maybe yours is geographical, such as a farm area or perhaps it is the members of an organization to which you belong.
So the first step you want to ask yourself is, ‘Who is your target market?’
Once you have narrowed this down then it’s easier to craft a message to that market.
STEP 2 - Identify the problems that your target market experiences.
Each market experiences its frustrations and pains. The secret to crafting a marketing message that will make your market sit up and listen is to identify their problem and the pain and suffering they feel as a result of that problem.
Remember the old saying that goes, ‘People don’t care about you, until they know you care. ‘Identifying your market’s pain and suffering tells them that you understand and empathize with them.
You’ll also find that identifying the problems that your market faces will, in turn, help you narrow down your target market.
For instance, perhaps I only want to target retirees and soon-to-retire executives who play golf.
So the second step you want to ask yourself is, ‘What is the problem they have and how does it make them feel?’
STEP 3 - Present your solution to your market’s problem.
The next step is to present your solution as a simple cure for all the pain and suffering your market is feeling as a result of their problem. This step is important in that most people won’t lift a finger unless they feel an urgent excruciating pain.
So once you identify the pain, rub it in and make people really feel it. Make it feel kind of like an old wound that just got re-opened and salt was poured on it.
Now, identify all the benefits of your solution and how those benefits will improve the life of your prospect and take away all their pain and anguish.
Try to reverse any perceived risk that your prospect might have with taking advantage of your solution. Also, try to position your solution as being easy to implement.
We are living in a ‘Do-It-For-Me’ society and people don’t want to jump through hoops just to solve their problem. In fact, most people would rather pay the money just to have the problem solved for them. So the third step is to ask yourself, ‘What is the solution that I have to offer my prospect?
STEP 4 - Present the results you’ve produced for other people in the same situation.
It’s not enough just to tell people you have a solution; you have to prove to them that your solution works. And you can talk all day about how you solved this and that problem, but people are skeptical and don’t automatically believe you.
People will believe other people who are similar to them that have achieved positive results. In this step you’ll need to prove your results by giving testimonials from current and former customers and provide case studies of actual problems that were solved and the results that were achieved.
The best testimonial is one that starts out by telling the prospect what life was like before applying your solution. It should be similar to the problem that you described in Step 2.
Then the testimonial should tell the prospect what life was like after applying your solution. This part should mimic many of the benefits that you gave in Step 3.
The most powerful case studies follow a similar format than that of testimonials. Your case study should be presented in three steps:
1. The problem
2. The solution
3. The results
When presenting the problem in your case study, discuss not only the problem, but also the negative results that the company was experiencing and the associated financial consequences of the problem.
When presenting the results, try to characterize all the benefits experienced as a result of the implementing the solution, how long it took to get those results (if it wasn’t a long time), and the financial implications to the company over the long-term.
So the fourth step is to ask yourself, ‘What are the results that your solution has produced?’
STEP 5 - Explain what makes you different from your competitors.
As a consultant in the corporate world I helped numerous companies assess potential software and service solutions. First we would send out an inquiry, then we would ask the vendors to come in and demo their product or service.
Often we asked the vendor about how they differed from their competition. I was constantly bewildered why the vendor would frequently say, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t bad mouth our competitors.
‘For some reason, they thought that it would make them look bad or underhanded.
As a buyer, we wanted the vendor to differentiate themselves from the other vendors that we were evaluating. We didn’t want them to bad mouth anyone; we just wanted to know what was different about their software compared to their competition’s product.
You need to communicate your differences! Prospects are looking for you to communicate your differences. And those differences need to have perceived value to the prospect. It needs to be something they care about.
The Big Marketing Message Mistake
The biggest marketing message mistake I see is companies communicating ‘What-We-Do’ instead of ‘What’s-In-It-For-Me. ‘If these were two radio channels (i.e. WWD vs WIIFM), which one do you think your prospect would rather hear?
While you are playing WWD on your radio transmitter, your prospect is looking for the WIIFM station. In order for your message to match your market you need to be broadcasting WIIFM.
Another mistake independent professionals make is to think that their label is part of their marketing message. For instance, people don’t care if you are a CRS (Certified Residential Specialist), they care about what you can do for them. So being a CRS shouldn’t be a part of your marketing message.
Conclusion
In this article I’ve shared with a simple formula for creating an effective marketing message. Your marketing message should be used in all your external communications.
It starts with knowing the wants, fears, problems, and needs of your target market and ends by crafting a message that speaks to those problems in a compelling and believable way. The result is an irresistible message that makes your prospect want to know more.
Posted in Develop Key Message, Key Message Formula
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