You Can’t Market Without A Message

0 CommentsWednesday • August 3, 2011 • by Jared Cullop

What is marketing? Putting forth your message to an audience (hopefully a receptive one) with the intent to educate and/or entice. The most effective, organic and oldest form of marketing is the word-of-mouth or third party referral. It is more trusted and generally more accurate in its audience target than anything else a marketer could hope to create. But, the number and influence of the “mouths” doing the referring necessarily limit it. The smaller you are, the narrower your reach until momentum kicks in and scale develops. This results in true, organic growth based on the quality of your offering, level of customer or client satisfaction, and your ability to scale up to handle the new business as it comes in. This is the natural way for a business to grow. But that’s too slow, right? “We need growth now, and fast. We just opened a new location, developed a new product, started a new firm based on work we’ve been doing for years, etc. We need an executable marketing plan that will grow us faster!” Assuming the quality of your offering is good, your current clients or customers (if you have any) are happy, and you have the capacity for growth, what do you do to grow your business? How do you market beyond word-of-mouth?

There are several questions you need to ask yourself about what you are planning to market, but that’s the topic of another post. For now, we’ll address the how, not the what. The foundation of the marketing plan is the message. What is your message? How do you relay your offering? How does your intended audience truly perceive it? Chances are, the message you put out isn’t the one that best attaches itself to your audience and resonates with them, assuming you have identified the right audience. Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? One reason is because it comes from the mouth of a satisfied client, in her own words, relaying a message of client experience from the candid standpoint of a client. What was important to her, how did she feel about the experience, was the outcome what she expected, did the job get done at a fair price, or was the experience worth the premium that was charged? This is what matters to a potential client – what has been the experience of the clients that went before them, and can they empathize with that experience through the message being relayed.

To effectively market, your message needs to be based on what is actually important to the potential client. The best way to determine that is to understand the message being relayed by your existing patrons, both the happy and disappointed ones. You have to “message” from the viewpoint of your actual client, not from the viewpoint of the offering provider. This requires a high level of empathy and willingness to hear the good and bad, willingness to dig and understand what makes your target group “tick”. Too many businesses are arrogant in their approach to messaging. They come at it from the wrong side. You have to determine what actually made the difference in the mind of the client when they chose you, and why they came back for more, or made it a point to refer their associates to you – or why they didn’t come back and told their associates to stay away from you. You must capture the message of existing clients in all its trusted power, all of its experiential and relative resonance, and all of its emotive qualities. Once your message is based on the actual experiential message your clients relay, then you have something powerful to put forth. The message is the foundation and it is the most critical part of your marketing plan. Once you have it nailed, spread it as far and wide as you can in those areas where your target audience frequents. Everything they see or hear about you needs to tie back to the core message that resonates with them. It becomes what your brand is built on. It becomes you. Your message is your foundation; you must get it right before you spread it.

So where do you spread it? That’s the topic of yet another post.