Do You Make Mistakes in Creating Your Marketing Message & Materials?

Do you make mistakes in creating your marketing campaigns and materials? Have you ever struggled on what to say to attract new prospects into your business? Have you ever created a marketing campaign that falls on it’s face, and makes you feel helpless on your marketing? If you’ve ever felt lost on what to say and do when you create your marketing message, this article is for you.

You are going to learn the five steps that you can use to get your current clients to give you the exact words and information to create all of your marketing materials. The added bonus to you is that you also get the chance to expand your current relationship with this client, because this will create a Trusted Advisor role for you.

My friend Sean D’Souza who created the Brain Audit is the person who inspired me to share this process. Sean’s process is a seven step process that is designed to perform the following three steps.

1. Enable you to spot every one of seven steps that your prospect uses to make buying decisions.
2. Present those steps in the proper sequence to your prospect.
3. Enable your prospect to buy without the traditional high pressure sales tactics that most of your competitors use.

I’ll share the seven steps in Sean’s process real quick, but I will stick to the one topic I promised.

1. Problem
2. Solution
3. Target Audience
4. Objections
5. Testimonials
6. Risk Reversal
7. Uniqueness

If you can’t wait until my next article to learn more about applying the steps in this process go visit Sean’s website for more info at psychotactics.com.

So here are the five steps for you to go through to get all the information you need to effectively market your business.

1. Demographic information of your client.
2. Sit down and interview your client.
3. Get a list of the problems, challenges, and issues your client experienced that caused them to invest in your product/service.
4. Drill down on the number one problem your client faces from the list you just generated.
5. Get feedback from your client after you create your marketing materials to make sure you’re hitting the nail on the head.

Now we’re going to explore each of the five steps to help you apply this process. After you have this formula it will be up to you to take the action of applying it in your business.

Step one, get the basic demographic information about your client. This step involves things such as gender, age, industry, position or title, years in business, etc. Now depending on what your business is you may consider taking this deeper as to what information you want to uncover.

Things such as where their business does business, how many employees do they have, who typically handles decisions on widgets, etc. Get information that is relevant to you and your business. You’re looking for trends that can also help you define who, what, where, when, why, and how you can go after other prospects who fall within the same demographic. You may have a niche that you can really focus on.

If it’s relevant you may also uncover some psychographic information. Here is how the dictionary on my Apple computer defines psychographics. In the field of marketing, demographics, opinion research, and social research in general, psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Activities, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty), and firmographic variables (such as industry, seniority and functional area).

Don’t you love dictionary’s?

Step two, sit down and interview your client. This is very straight forward. Pick as many clients as you feel is necessary to sit down with and ask the questions in step three and four. I would pick at minimum five to ten clients, at minimum!

Step three, get a list of all the problems they experienced that caused them to invest in your product or service. This list should encompass a minimum of five problems, issues, or challenges that your client experienced before working with you.

This is where you will have to start being a detective and helping your client think through all issues. You may also have to use the knowledge of your business to lead the witness. What this means is that you pose some questions to help them think through even more issues, problems, and challenges.

Step four, this is where your client picks their number one problem from the list in step three. Your skills in questioning will have to be even more probing and curious this time.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the number one issue they shared was “Getting more new clients.” Your line of questions should or could be as follows.

“What do you mean by that?”
“Why is that problem?”
“Where is that a problem?”
“When does that become a problem?”
“Who is impacted by this problem?”
“How does the problem affect you?”

Use these questions to serve as an outline that you can follow. If you need to adjust some of the questions to fit your situation, have at it.

Remember, your objective is to drill down and find out everything you can about their number one problem. Leave no stone unturned.

Step five, is to get feedback from your client. Recap everything you wrote down with your client before you leave to make sure you understand, and have the true essence of what they told you in their words. Since you were recording the interview you won’t have to rely totally on your notes.

Send the recorded audio to a service that will create a PDF or DOC of your audio file. You can Google a service, or you can go check out iDictate.com.

Once you get your file back you will use the information your client helped you create to make all of your marketing material using their words. Remember that you will use the sum total of all the interviews you conducted. Allow for variance in industries, different demographics, and any other nuances between your clients.

Then go back and get feedback again from the clients you met with. If they give you a thumbs up, you’re golden. If not, find out where you need to make adjustments. Then go make the adjustments and come back.

You now have the five steps to help you create your marketing materials, and get your message as perfect as it can be. You’re probably thinking this is a lot work aren’t you? Well…you’re right, it is a lot of work. Think of the alternative. You can keep doing ineffective marketing, throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks, and guessing at what get’s your prospect to say, “How do you do that?” Or you can go through this process and get effective.

Efficient is doing things right. Effective is doing the right things.

That’s the great thing about this country. If you waste money on marketing you’re not going to get in trouble by the authorities for being an ineffective marketer. It’s not a crime by public opinion.

On the flip side, it is a crime when your family, your employees, and the prospects needing your help are relying on you and your business. So in closing I’ll say, “Don’t be lazy, and take some time to do the right thing.”

Be awesome and take action today.