I said, 'Yes, but explain to me what your message is to your prospects. What do you say in your brochures and advertising?" He had a puzzled look on his face as if I was from another planet.

This is not uncommon. Most small businesses are confused about their marketing message. Some think it’s their slogan and others think it’s a regurgitation of all their awards and how long they’ve been in business. Still others think it’s their vision and mission statement or their company slogan.

It’s none of the above.

Why is Your Marketing Message Important?

Your marketing 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 Selling presentations Website Speeches and workshops Daily correspondence Proposals Brochures

Basically, any form of external communication will include parts or even your entire marketing message. Even outgoing faxes and your telephone answering service will use parts of your marketing message.

Your marketing message is what grabs your prospect’s attention, tells them how you can solve their problem, why they should trust you, and why they should choose to do business with you over and above any and all other choices they might have.

Most of you have already developed a marketing message and just don’t know it. Some of you think you have developed a marketing message but really haven’t.

For example, I was visiting with a company’s showroom here in Bombay the other day and picked up one of their tri-fold brochures. Inside the tri-fold were the company’s vision and mission statement and a bunch of stuff about how long they’ve been in business including small bios about the owning partners and managers.

The brochure gave me no compelling reason about why I should do business with them or how they can help solve my problem. This is typical. Most small business owners have this erroneous idea that prospects want to know all about their business rather than their own problems.

The Key to Creating a Winning Marketing Message

The term 'message' in itself denotes a communication that is received and understood. The key to creating a winning marketing message is to make sure that it matches the wants and needs of those who receive it.

Your marketing message should 'speak' to your prospect. This is done by appealing to your prospect’s 'hot buttons' or those sensitivities that trigger an emotional reaction.

For instance, if you found out yesterday that you are suffering from Polycistic Kidney Disease (a disease that I have and the disease which killed my mother when I was seven years old) and you received a typical piece of 'junk mail' that had the phrase, 'How to Survive Polycistic Kidney Disease' on the outside of the envelope.

What type of emotional response do you think I would have?

Would I open the letter? Of course! Why? The message matched the market (me, a PKD sufferer).

However, that was only the first step in the marketing message. It got me to open the envelope and read the headline of the letter. Now let’s suppose the headline read, 'New Hope for PKD sufferers - - Recent Tests Point to Potential Cure to PKD.'

Do you think I would continue reading the letter? Yes!

Suppose as I continued reading and I see charts, pictures, and testimonials that provide positive reassurance that their claim to cure PKD is true. Do you think I would get excited after reading this information? You bet!

As I get to the bottom of the letter I am given a list of other research companies that are working to find a cure for PKD but only one (the author of the letter) has unraveled the gene sequence, which holds the key to a cure.

Do you think I would call their toll-free number to get their free report? Absolutely!

You have just witnessed a complete marketing message in action.

5 Steps to Creating Your Marketing Message

Now that I have demonstrated the power of an effective marketing message, let’s review the simple five-step formula for creating your own powerful and complete marketing message.

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STEP 1 - Identify your target market.

Every successful small business has a target market whether they know it or not. Even the local dry cleaner has a target market, which is probably all the professional people living within a five mile radius of their store. Their target market is geographic.

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 stay-at-home Moms that want to earn some extra money without leaving their homes.

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 care whether they were bad mouthing 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 thing that their label is part of their marketing message. For instance, people don’t care if you are a CMC (Certified Management Consultant), they care about what you can do for them. So being a CMC 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.

About the Author:

David Frey is the author of the Small Business Marketing Bible and the Marketing Best Practices Newsletter. For a free lifetime subscription visit http://www.TheMarketingBible.com 

December 15, 2003