Crafting Your Marketing Message: The 1 strategy that guarantees to connect you with your ideal clients
Maybe you’re like most professionals and small business owners who believe that crafting your marketing message is an easy exercise of arranging basic information about your business into a concise format. There’s tons of advice offering you 30 tips, 20 hacks or 10 steps on how to identify those pieces and combine them to craft your perfect marketing message.
The myth of crafting the quick and easy marketing message
So why then if it’s so quick and easy, do so many marketing messages fail to deliver, i.e. attract the right clients?
The answer is simple
It’s not a quick and easy task to get your marketing message right.
It’s a process; a challenging and time-consuming process, that forces you to reflect on the essence of what you do and how you want to get your business into the market place. But it’s a process that is well worth the time and effort you invest in it, as you’ll discover below. It’s a process that is becoming more and more relevant in a post-pandemic world.
To understand why the process is so importance, let’s cut through the confusion surrounding your marketing message by answering two primary questions.
Getting clarity about your Marketing Message
♦ What exactly is it?
It’s how you communicate what you do to the audience you want to reach.
Here’s where the problems begin.
A lot of people confuse a marketing message with a mini bio, a self-promotional pitch or a catchy tagline. Yes, it’s connected to them, but it’s not reducible to them.
Your marketing message should inform your bio, your pitch and your tagline. It should, in fact, inform all your content, e.g sales letter, social media posts, website copy, etc. It should function as the golden thread running through all your marketing material, that gives it a distinct identity.
Your marketing message is the blueprint for your marketing strategy and all your marketing content.
♦ What does it do?
Some people promise that your marketing message will get you more paying clients, build immediate trust, explain your offer and get people to instantly buy from you.
The truth is it won’t and can’t do any of those things.
It’s the starting point, the cornerstone that gives all that a consistent frame of reference.
The job of your marketing message is to position you to be easily found by the clients you want to reach.
It does that by getting their attention and making them curious to know more so that they then want to connect with you.
How Your Marketing Message Creates Connection
Let’s start at the end and reverse engineer the process.
If the purpose of your message is to connect you with your potential clients, then what creates human-to-human connection?
Communication. Our ability and willingness to talk to each other.
That means we have to abandon the conventional monologue we string together about our ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ and replace it with an interactive exchange that invites a reciprocal response.
Your marketing message is the beginning of a dialogue!
This is the ONE strategy I promised you above.
It’s a strategy that evolves organically once you have clarified who your ideal clients are and what they want. During the process of crafting your marketing message, your intended audience become the ideal clients you want to reach.
So how do you craft a marketing message that connects you with your ideal clients through dialogue?
Your Marketing Message starts a Dialogue
Because your message starts a dialogue, you have to shift from the monologue mode of talking AT the other to talking TO the other in the form of a dialogue.
How then do you start a dialogue?
You can’t start a dialogue with by ticking the boxes on a best-of list. Nor can you start a dialogue by talking about yourself and promoting your business.
Starting a dialogue forces you to shift your focus away from your perspective to that of your dialogue-partner. You have to know who exactly your partner is – what are the unifying factors in that group – and what matters to them. To know what matters to them, you first have to do the vital preliminary work of listening.
When you listen deeply, you’ll discover what they want e.g. more clients, different clients, increased revenue, more efficient systems, etc., You’ll also hear how they describe what they want, so that you can use their language to explain how you can help get it and create a better outcome. And finally you can tell them why you are the right choice to get them those results.
But if you’re talking to them all the time in your marketing message, how can they engage in a dialogue with you?
They don’t respond verbally. They respond by self-identifying with your message because it shows them you know them and know what matters to them. For example, their auto-response to finding their problem described is, “Yes, that’s me. That’s what I struggle with!” or, when you describe the outcome you provide, “That’s exactly what I want!”
Your marketing message has done its job!
You now have the attention of your potential clients who found themselves and what they want described there. It invites them to take the next step and continue the dialogue.
Have you made it easy for them to continue the dialogue? Can they easily (one click) book a call? Do they know exactly how and where to get more information, etc.?
A Personalised Marketing Message is Authentic and Unique
What I hope is obvious from the above one-step strategy for crafting your marketing message is that you can dispense with ticking the boxes on a best-of list. You can also disregard the typical manipulative tactics and the conventional sleaze-bait in the language of mainstream marketing.
You can drop the language of scarcity, guilt and fear whose only purpose is to manipulate audience response. The ‘irresistible’ buzzwords and jargon are unnecessary as you are not trying to coerce a response from your dialogue partner. Because you’ve listened and responded directly to your potential clients, your marketing message is customised for them and communicates the value of what you do in an authentic, empathic language. Your potential clients helped you craft it after all.
You can learn from other successful marketing messages, not by mimicking their language or the tactics they use, but by understanding how they crafted a message that speaks directly to the audience they want to reach. What works for a corporate brand – no matter how brilliant or successful – does not transfer on a scaled-down version to service professionals, micro or small business owners.
How we communicate is gaining on relevance as we move into a post-pandemic world. People have had the time to reflect on their ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ and plan for a more personalised, sustainable and authentic way of doing business. Dialogue belongs to the emerging ‘new’ normal.
Your marketing message is your unique identity – it communicates the essence of why your clients choose to work with you.
Why Your Marketing Message is so Important
To understand why it’s so important, let’s summarise again what your marketing message is and what it does:
- It’s the blueprint for your marketing strategy and all your communication
- it positions you to be found by the people looking for what you offer
Crafting your marketing message is the vital first step in your marketing strategy. Think of it as the resonance of a pure tone or the ripples created by the pebble.
You now have the attention of your potential clients and they’re curious to know more. How do you keep their attention, build a sustainable, trust-based relationship and turn them into ideal clients ready to buy from you?
You continue the dialogue you started with your message.
How do you do that?
Watch this space!
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