Marketing Messages

If the economic news has you holding your head in your hands, you’re not alone. For some businesses, the gloom and doom headlines of the past two weeks are translating into cancelled projects, uncertain contracts, slower consumer spending, clients getting gun-shy about their expansion plans, you name it. It may even mean real cutbacks in your business as a result of what’s happening in your key markets.

What happens all too often, though, is that marketing efforts are the first area sent to the chopping block. This can be a colossal mistake.

Brands, messages, core values. We marketing types often get accused of throwing around buzzwords like these. We like them. We coin new ones all the time. And often, we expect our clients or those non-marketing folks in our offices to know what the heck we're talking about. But the reality is, you can throw away the fancy terms and focus on one thing that is simple to understand. And that one thing will help your business.

Guaranteed.

That thing is called a key message. And it's what separates "marketing" from "communicating."

I was interested this week to participate in a B-2-B webinar with David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of PR & Marketing. And, as usual, David said something interesting.

This time, it was the idea that an e-book is essentially a glorified white paper. 

Have you ever bought something because of a mission statement?

Recently, an older post on The Essential Message blog caught my attention. In it, Michel Neray points out that no one has ever bought anything because of a mission statement. And as someone who has massaged and crafted mission statements, messages and taglines (and who has sat through more visioning meetings than I care to remember), I relate to what he's saying.

Seth Godin, one of my favorite writers on business topics, writes today about money and motivation. And he really gets to the heart of the matter on messaging and marketing.

He writes:

I was talking with a friend the other day about a topic that's important to him personally. At one point in our discussion -- in the middle of a sentence -- he suddenly stopped and switched gears.

"What I'm really trying to say is,..." And then he made a clear, eloquent statement. Immediately, I understood. Somehow, though, it had taken us 30 minutes to get to this point.

Now, let's admit it. We all do this on occasion. Sometimes important personal matters can be hard to articulate.

I was talking to a client the other day about something we both feel strongly about. Something that has a huge impact on the effectiveness of your copy, your overall message strategy and even your brand. Something we're all born with and yet we often hide when it comes to business.

Emotion.

Marketing independence, you say? What does that mean? I'm talking about letting go of the ideas that keep you stuck in the same unsatisfying definitions of what your marketing message "has to be".

In honor of the July 4th holiday, this week I want to share four tips for leaving your old rules behind and freeing yourself to think differently about your business' marketing message.

I'm just back from vacation and ready to plunge into a new pile of work. And what strikes me most about the projects on my plate right now? While the goals may be different, these are companies, institutions and entrepreneurs who are passionate about what they're offering to the marketplace. Now, that's generally true because those are the folks I tend to want to work with. But in this case, it is doubly true.

Creating marketing messages that have personality, that communicate authentically who we are usually requires us to step out of the box of traditional marketing communications speak. After all, marketing your business is about having a conversation. And what do people do in conversations? They tell stories.

Here are five ideas to get your juices flowing in finding and telling your own stories. Start by thinking about something that you want to communicate to your audience. Something you might be a little stuck with is good. Or something that feels dull. Then, let's play.