The Difference Between Your Marketing Failing and Succeeding

The central element to all of your marketing is your message. This is the main point or idea you are trying to convey to your audience. This message can make or break your marketing efforts.

What is your core message?

Your message can be summed up in two parts: who you serve and what value you provide.

First, let’s look at who you serve. This is also known as your target market. Who are they? What traits do they have? What problems do they face?

It’s important to hone in on who this person is. The more you can narrow down your audience, the more your message will speak to the right people. When your audience is broad, your message becomes generic. People ignore generic marketing because they don’t feel it is speaking directly to their needs.

Next, what value do you provide to this audience? What problem can you solve for them? What benefit can they receive by working with you?

This is different than the services you offer or the technology you use. Think about the outcome or result that your services provide. This is what your potential customers are concerned with. They want to know that you can help them reach their end goal, regardless of the process it takes to get there.

Keep it focused on your audience

A big mistake is being overly self-promotional with your message. None of your prospects care much about you. It’s more important that you can solve their problem, than it is that you have impressive credentials or qualifications. Keep your message focused on the client, and not yourself.

Keep in mind what you want prospects to take away from your message. What can you do for them?

Put it into practice

Thinking about your message can seem theoretical, but there are many practical places to apply it. It can drive all of your communications.

Within your content marketing, use your message to help you generate content ideas. This includes content for blogs, podcasts, newsletters, videos, etc. Think about the problems your audience is experiencing, and create content to help answer those questions. This will also help you stay on topic and focused. It’s easy to go off on tangents when creating content, but by remembering who you serve and what value you provide, you can stay on track.

On your website, your message should be infused throughout. The homepage for many companies breaks the rule about being too self-promotional. Use your homepage to speak directly to your target audience and show them you are here to solve their problems. Instead of focusing so much on your services, be up front about the results you provide. This is also true of your About page. This page is not really about you, it is more so about how you can help your clients achieve their goals.

Finally, your sales pages, proposals, and other sales materials shouldn’t try to convince a prospect about how great you are. Stay focused on your client and what your service can do for them.

When you stay focused on your audience and solving their problems, your marketing will resonate and be more effective.