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How did marketing get to be so complicated — and expensive? Isn’t it really just about telling people you’ve got something great to offer and convincing them to try it?

Despite its conceptual simplicity, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of articles, publications, books, websites and consultants all ready to share “the big secret” with you. Great — except “the big secret” isn’t one. Despite the hype, marketing is still as conceptually straight-forward as it’s always been: first, tell your customers you have what they want or need, second, give it to them — along with excellent service — and third, do it again.

The trouble is clutter. In a world of information overload, with messaging coming from every possible angle, breaking through is the real challenge. Here’s how to get your message through loud and clear:

Give the People What They Want
People zero-in on things they want, bypassing those of lesser or limited interest. Capitalize on that tendency by ensuring you’re offering the right thing to the right audience. Do your homework — close doesn’t count.

Why NOW?
It’s easy to tell people why to buy your product or service — it’s much more difficult to give them a logical reason why they should do it right now. That reason is usually an offer that is time sensitive, so the answer to “why now” becomes “you’ll miss out if you don’t”.

No Cheese, Please
While special offers with aggressive advertising and flashy colours and images work exceptionally well in certain markets and industries, it may or may not work in yours. Sure, you want to stand out, but make sure it’s with clever, high impact words and images, not colourful fluff and exclamation-filled text that’s more likely to be labeled by your audience as “cheesy” than viewed as an offer that’s not-to-be-missed.

Tell Them What You’re Going to Tell Them
There are few better sayings then “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them”. It’s about message retention, and the only way to achieve that is through repetition— within reason, of course.

The Whole Truth
When you’ve got a great story to tell, it’s hard to resist telling it, but don’t give in to temptation! If you try to tell your audience EVERYTHING, you’re going to lose them before you get a chance to get through to them. Focus, focus, focus. By concentrating on key benefits your messages will hit home.

Communicating your sales messages may mean keeping it simple, but that doesn’t mean it IS simple. Most businesses need help to fine-tune their messaging and once that happens, all marketing, advertising and selling investments start generating better returns. Consider your own company’s messages: are they getting through to your customers as effectively as they could?

If not, isn’t it time you did something about it?


© 2005 5th Business Management Practice Inc.
www.5th Business.com