What’s in it for me? Is your messaging turning your customers off?
When was the last time you looked at your marketing messages? I’m guessing it wasn’t recently, right?
Messaging, that part of your external-facing marketing communication strategy, quickly becomes stale and out of date. It hinges on so many things and if any one of them changes, you probably need to look again at your core messages.
Let’s assume that a while ago you sat down with your sales team, your support people, your marketing guys and you talked about what your business was about, what markets you were in and who your customers were, and then worked out how you were going to ‘message’ yourselves to best reach your market and talk to your customers.
This is a typical process from which your sales and marketing messages emerge. You might have factored-in where you were in the technology adoption lifecycle or done some segmenting to address the needs of different personas in the buying cycle as well. Lots of other stuff can, and should, inform your messaging.
Has anything changed?
Now ask yourself this: has anything changed since that messaging session?
- Are you still in the same markets?
- Do you have any new products or services?
- Are you moving up the value stack?
- Are you using your old messages in your new markets?
- Have you the de facto solution in any of your markets?
- Have your marketing efforts produced the results you wanted or expected?
- How is your sales funnel looking?
- Are prospects moving through the buying cycle?
If the answers to any of these questions (and many others besides) causes you to stop and think, you need to revisit your core messaging.
If you get your messaging right, your customers will buy from you
OK, so you know you need to rethink your company / product / service / market messaging. Where do you start?
Homework
You’ll need to get your team back together again and you might want to get a facilitator in who can steer the conversations towards the desired goals while keeping everyone on-side.
Everyone involved will have some homework to do. Here are some of the questions everyone should ask themselves in advance:
- What are our core messages for each of our products / services / markets? It’s OK to cheat and look at the current sales and marketing materials.
- Why do customers buy from us? Our competitors?
- Who are the buyers and influencers in our markets?
- What criteria do they buy on / what’s important to them?
- What are the benefits of our products / services to our customers?
- What problem do we think we’re solving for our customers?
- What questions do you get repeatedly from customers and prospects?
- What’s wrong, or no longer right, with what we’re saying on the website and in our sales materials?
- With these bits of intel, you’re going to be in a good position to reassess what you’re saying about your business and whether it bears any relation to what customer challenges you are addressing with your products.
Get your messaging wrong and your buyers won’t see the relevance of what you do to their situation
The answer to the question “are we messaging the right way?” will emerge very quickly. What won’t however, is an answer to the “OK, what should we be saying then?” question.
It has to be right
It’s perhaps not surprising that shifting market dynamics and drivers; modified product / service capabilities; different economic mood; new market trends; new competition; changes in your personnel etc. will all affect how you message and communicate what you do and why your customers should buy from you.
And because your messaging is the basis for all your verbal, printed and digital communication, it must be right.
They will buy
Having consistent, compelling and clear messages, driven by the benefits of what you do, has a significant impact on how interesting and useful you come across to your customers when they make purchase decisions. Get it wrong and they won’t see the relevance of what you do to their situation. Get it right and they will feel that you’re talking to them in a way that demonstrate you understand their issues. And when that happens, they will buy.
Time to have a messaging rethink?
Every day of delay is another day your customers don’t understand your offering and another day your sales team is failing to engage them.
