Do you want your marketing efforts to be successful?
Of course you do.
Like baking a cake, a successful marketing campaign requires the perfect balance of ingredients. Too much or too little of any, and the cake doesn’t turn out. Use a wrong ingredient, and you get something, but it isn’t the cake you were hoping for.
Same with marketing. Combine the right ingredients in the right proportions, you get a success. Don’t, and you get a learning experience.
So what are the ingredients of a successful marketing campaign?
Glad you asked.
Every successful marketing campaign is built from the right balance of:
- Market
- Message
- Media
Let’s take a look at each.
Market
The market is the audience you are trying to reach. To get this ingredient right, you need to know who you are selling to. To do that, you need to ask and answer two critical questions.
First, who are they?
You need to know specifically what they look like. For those of you who sell to consumers, it’s things like:
- age
- gender
- income
- do they have kids
- where they live
- etc.
If you sell to businesses, it’s things like:
- industry
- company size
- job role
- location
You need to know what they do.
- Where do they shop?
- What do they buy?
- How do they spend their time?
- How do they make decisions?
- What interests them?
Second, you need to know what their problem is.
Just like you need to know who they are, you need to know what their problems and pains are. If you can talk about what they’re feeling and what they hope for, they’ll believe that you understand them and can help.
The more focused this group is, the better. More on why that is so important when I talk about the message.
Message
The second key ingredient to a successful marketing campaign is the message.
Simply put, the right message is one that speaks directly to your market’s problems and desired solutions.
How do you know what that is?
If you’ve done your homework on the market, you know who they are, their problems, and what they’re looking for. It’s time to put that knowledge to work.
Your marketing message needs to do three things:
- Get the market’s attention
- Make them believe you are a credible solution to their problem
- Convince them to take the next step
As anyone who has dealt with kids (or juvenile adults) knows, there’s good attention and bad attention. You want the good attention.
How do you get it?
Be relevant.
That means saying something that matters to them. A simple example of relevant would be a sign announcing ice cold water at a park on a hot, sunny summer day. Trying to sell that same water on the coldest winter day is an example of not being relevant.
What are examples of bad attention?
- Saying or doing outrageous things, or anything that has nothing to do with what matters to the market
- Intrusively interrupting people
- Using misleading claims to get people to listen
Once you have their attention, you need to show them you are a credible solution to their problem.
There are many ways to do this. Here are a few…
- Describe how you solve the problem in a way that shows them the benefits of your offer
- Use testimonials of people like them who used your solution
- Show your solution in action
It’s the power of the message that makes a narrow audience so important. When you are working with a small niche, you can speak directly to a big problem for them. As your audience gets bigger and more diverse, you need to water down the message. When you do that, the message loses all its power.
Finally, you need to convince them to take the next step. How?
It can be as simple as telling them what to do next (e.g., “Call now”, “Buy today”, etc.). To really seal the deal, make it clear what’s in it for them if they take the next step. If you’ve succeeded in getting their attention and showing that you have a credible solution to their problem, the market will want to take the next step.
Media
You need to put your message in the place where your market will see it and be able to act on it.
Going back to our ice water example…
You want to reach people while their sweating in the park. That means setting up a sign in the park. An ad on Facebook isn’t going to work – even if it has the perfect message aimed at the right audience.
Getting this part right means thinking about where your market goes and what they are doing when your message would be relevant to them.
It also means tailoring your message to take advantage of the place you are advertising. Radio is not the place for a message that relies on a stunning image.
Bringing it together
Think about your marketing efforts. Are you working to get the ingredients just right? Or are you doing what’s easy?
What kind of results are you getting?
If you think you should be doing better, take a good look at whether you have the right combination of market, message, and media.
Need help with that? Get in touch!