How Do You Build a Better Marketing Message?

How can you get your marketing message heard above the crowd?  Many of the people you are trying to connect with are exposed to over 30,000 messages a day. How can you connect with your best clients today?

I started my career in direct sales over 30 years ago. It’s funny, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  If you didn’t have the right message then, you lost your job. It might take several weeks or months but you wouldn’t last. I saw many great marketers fail in selling because their message missed the target.

Today, if your marketing message misses the mark it could be seen by millions of people. Not really, very few messages get read and acted on by millions of people. Many social media experts would like you to believe they have the silver bullet that will make your message go viral.

Every day my clients and I are contacted by people who assure us that they can help us get noticed by many, many people.

Not that I’m a cynic, I want to believe that my message connects with many people on a regular basis. I also understand the power of creating targeted marketing messages.

Much of the past 30 years has been invested into connecting with a critical few that can make a difference to my client organizations. Today, we have many options for creating our marketing messages. We have many choices how they are delivered to our markets.

Now for the truth; most marketing messages fail to connect to their intended targets.  In the past, your advertising costs were based on the volume of people who were exposed to your message. The more people the better. Doesn’t this sound like a familiar process?

I can remember sitting in a corner office and having an advertising sales professional tell me why I should advertise in their magazine, with their several million readers I would be assured that many of my potential clients would be exposed to our marketing message. These people would pick up the phone and call to learn more. The phone didn’t ring, or it didn’t ring much. It was hard to justify how much I spent to get so few leads. The mass marketing message failed!

Fast forward to today, social media and social selling are changing the way we do business. I’m told if I have enough Twitter followers or many Facebook fans, I’m able to share my message with my best clients. They will flock to me at trade shows and I will win acclaim from my many professional peers. My marketing message will be out there forever producing revenue.

I wish it was this simple. I’ve found my most successful clients are constantly reinventing their marketing message to connect with their many evolving, and growing, numbers of global stakeholders. They are also managing business development efforts to have multiple contacts with their audience.

I believe the five key elements in today’s successful marketing messages are:

• Market
• Message
• Media
• Timing
• Creativity

Starting next week, I share each of these key elements and how to apply them to improve your marketing messages results. See you then.