Marketing is essentially story telling.
It should be non-fiction because integrity is everything if you want to stay in business.
But it is still essentially a story, even if it as short as a benefit or tag line.
The “story” has to answer two questions for the prospective customer: “What’s in it for me?” and “Why should I believe you?”
Likely a future article on building belief and trust over time will be helpful, but for now, we’ll stick to the answering those questions with your story.
There are 3 Keys to answering those two questions:
1. The first key is to “Know the audience”:
Choosing what to say and how you will say it depends on who you are in a conversation with. Like it or not, marketing is a conversation now. The more you know and understand your customer, the better you can relate, and shift the conversation to “we” (from the “us and them” the consumer may be starting from).
For example, I’m working with a sporting goods startup that is launching a product this winter to help people learn to do something more easily and more safely (sorry, have to be vague until it is launched).
So the first question we need to answer is: are we speaking to the sport participant or the parent? Of course, we would need to know a lot more about them, but to make the points here we’ll use that basic difference: participant vs. parent.
2. The second key is to “Provide a big benefit that resonates with the customer emotionally”:
The reality is that buying is primarily emotional, and we rationalize it later.
Yes, you do buy that way.
So do I, and I also prefer not to admit it.
This means that essentially, you are helping the customer give themselves permission to take the action they already want to take. If your message really connects with the target customer, you will also actually spark recognition of the need for the action in people that weren’t already in the market.
Understanding this, it surprises me that so many marketers focus on the features, or “speeds and feeds” for the tech products. However, I’m sure the sports product (like most products) won’t get anywhere by talking about the product specifications. This approach requires the customer to “connect the dots” and infer “What’s in it for me”. Frankly, most people aren’t going to work that hard to help you sell them something.
A better approach would be to talk about the benefit to the customer. For the sports product, the benefit would be “learn to do X more easily”.
To take that benefit to an emotional level, we need to know the customer really well and understand their motivations, fears, and concerns. For the sports product, at the very least we need to know whether it is the parent or the participant.
If it is the parent, we could leverage the emotional need to keep their child safe (people get hurt learning these things, and most often are not that close to home or supervised).
If it is the participant, we could work on avoiding the “epic fail” in front of their friends to get the emotions engaged.
Either way, the best result will come when we get to an emotional place that resonates with the customer. That implies you’ve taken the time to know the customer, and can communicate to them like you are one of them.
3. The third key is to “Provide a reason to believe that makes sense to them”:
Why should they believe and trust that you can deliver on the emotional benefit you promised them?
Do your verbal and visual messages show them that you understand them?
Do you have testimonials and great reviews from people like them?
What other proof do you have that is meaningful to them (note: your credentials, etc. may not be relevant to them)?
For the sports product we are NOT going to tell them what a fine bunch of engineers, marketers, and business people we have working on this!
We will tell them how long the inventor has been involved in the sport, and what led him to invent it.
It will likely include his story of struggle to learn the sport, and then to develop the product so he could help more people get the enjoyment he gets. There will be testimonials and demonstrations by people just like them, and the people already great at the sport. And everything about the marketing will look and feel like a place they would like to hang out. Of course, this also leads us back to the first key: know the audience.
