‘Marketing’ & ‘Communication’ are two words that should not be compounded. They have entirely different meanings.
The confusion of meaning amongst quasi marketers is the beginning of wasted marketing budgets. It is also the source of much of the dumb rubbish clogging up the digital pipes.
Following are 4 strategies to increase effectiveness.
Define the objective of the communication.
What seems to happen here is that the tactics become confused with the objectives. This is not about optimising your website, or deciding whether or not to use Facebook ads, it is about creating the outcomes you want. Create demand for a product, generate awareness of the company, attract funding, and many others may be the objectives of a marketing investment, but they are not the tools for implementation. Lack of clarity of objectives, time frame, and performance metrics, is a basic marketing sin. I always advocate for a SMART framework.
Who is the audience?
Having figured out why you are communicating, the obvious next step is who you need to communicate with. Who is your ideal customer, and who do you need to engage to generate a transaction?
Your ideal customer may be hospitals with specialist surgical services. A relatively specific ideal customer, but inside that customer, there are those who sign the order, engineers who assess regulatory compliance, accountants who have control over budgets, and the medical staff who use the product. All have different concerns and motivations, and all require differing communications. Understanding the audiences, crafting messages and selecting the channels by which they will be delivered should be second nature.
What does your audience want and need to hear?
Often these are two different communications. They may want to hear about the prices and delivery times, but they need to hear about the regulatory status, availability, and detailed specifications of the range of options being presented to them.
Your task is to clearly communicate what it is you are offering, the benefit it delivers, and why they should care, along with presenting a call to action that is compelling.
How do you communicate?
What is the tone of the messages, and how do you reach the target is the oldest marketing challenge in the book.
Every successful marketing communication is in some form a story. Do you use drama, comedy, a villain, testimonial, or do you use an academic approach to the copy? This even applies to the blazing headline of a huge price reduction, where that is the only thing in the ad. Even that tells a story to those that see it.
What media is used, newspapers, magazines, social platforms, direct mail, email, digital advertising, face to face? In most cases it will be some combination of these, and many other options available to deliver messages.
While writing this post, it was constantly in my mind that ‘everyone knows this stuff’ and ‘nobody out there needs to be told, again, how to suck eggs’.
However, the weight of crap I see floating across the web, and sadly into my inbox, unsolicited, told me otherwise.
I am confident nobody reading this needs to hear it again, but perhaps you could share it to your less enlightened comrades.
If you want to get noticed, lift your game!
Header illustration via DALL-E in 5 seconds.
