Focusing on a Clear Market Offering

Being clear on your marketing message

Having real clarity on your marketing message and who the target market is will set your marketing efforts apart from the rest. When developing a marketing message, it is important to be and thoughtful about who is being spoken to, to make the most out of every communication.

 

When putting together a social media post, advertisement or a newsletter, ask yourself: who are you talking to? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do? Actively thinking about this will make sure your post is focused and single minded, so the service offering is clear from the beginning. Doing this keeps the marketing on message, is targeted, drives higher results and can be cheaper to undertake.

 

Knowing what you are selling, how you are selling it and why your clients should buy it will create more strategic marketing and a compelling reason to buy which will drive greater results: if you can’t clearly state what you are selling and why someone should buy it, then how can you expect your customers or even your employees to?

 

The main ways to gain a deep understanding of your offering are:

 

• Understand your target: Identify who you are selling to, what their key drivers are and why they want to buy your product or service, such as because it saves them time or money.
• Develop your key messages: Developing a key message that you base all your marketing material from will mean your marketing, sales, staff and word of mouth referrals are all saying the same message.
• Identify your channels: Map out your channels for marketing each service or product so it is easy to articulate where and how things are sold.

 

The importance of staying on track

Staying on track with your marketing efforts is very important as marketing is a long game that rewards consistency. It can be frustrating when marketing efforts don’t show results right away, and you might be tempted to change your strategy but it is important to stay on course as nothing worth having is gained without persistence.

 

Results are not going to be immediate and it is important to stay focused and stick with techniques long enough to see if they work. Social media sites and Google searches favour more established sites and pages that post content consistently, so it may take a while of consistent posting and marketing before your site is shown to more users. [1]

In addition to this, a consistent marketing message that is posted regularly through your chosen marketing channels will make your brand feel familiar to the audience, which will then lead to trust. This is why marketing results aren’t usually immediate.

 

So how can you stay on course?

 

• Goals: Set and revise your high level goals. This can be in terms of revenue, profit, number of new customers and/or units sold.
• Break it down: Figure out your goals by product, channel and segments.
• Leads: Figure out how many new leads you will need to meet your goals and build your marketing campaigns around these numbers.
• Plan: Plan out your campaigns from goals, media channels, materials and resources needed to budget and offers.
• Deliver: Deliver on value and promises so customers will trust your business.

 

Staying on course will ensure your marketing effort is streamlined. Don’t divert from the course if you are not seeing results straight away, marketing is a long game.

 

Accountability: finding your ‘why’

When a new business owner has suddenly become their own boss, often times they lack the accountability they had previously as an employee and goals and direction get pushed to the side. A lot of new businesses fail in the first year because people need things to keep them accountable, and whether that is a person, a system or a goal, it needs to be something to grasp on to when things get challenging.

 

For most people, the biggest source of accountability is their ‘why’. A ‘why’ is a reason to continue putting in the work, even when things are slow (like when the marketing hasn’t kicked in yet!). Having a why provides perspective and focus to keep business owners looking at the bigger picture.

 

To find out your why, think about why you started, what you want to achieve and why this is so meaningful to you. This will keep you pushing through the tough times and toward the rewarding times that could be just around the corner!

 

 

 “Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign” – John Buscall.

 

 

[1] Google, How Search works, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs, 2010.