Effectively communicating how your product or service uniquely solves a customer’s problem in a clear, concise, and compelling manner is crucial for driving sales and achieving business success.
Primary Implication
Customers can’t do business with you if they don’t know you exist. It costs a lot more to keep your business open for a small customer base than it costs you to advertise and promote your business through online marketing, social media, email, local search, and more.
You reduce the risk of ineffective marketing by factoring the costs of marketing and the sales it’s projected to produce into your business plan.
Overview
The how for your business lies in succinctly articulating, in three to five statements, what problem your product solves for the buyer, and how they benefit from what you offer. Ultimately, you must be able to communicate this message clearly to anyone, including those who don’t recognize that there is a solution to their problems.
The primary goal of most promotions is to tell your target how you will deliver on what they value. If you don’t have anything new to promote to your customers, then direct your promotions toward the area of highest interest for your target customers and create the motivation for them to try the product or service you offer.
You improve the effectiveness of your promotions when you speak to your target customer in compelling and relevant terms. To be compelling and relevant, you must anchor your messages on the marketing mix elements most relevant to your target customer.
To identify which marketing mix element is likely to be most relevant to your target customer, think about the importance of your thumb in gripping an object. The function of the thumb is to work with the other digits. Your promotions are like your thumb; they need to work with the essential element in your marketing mix that influences people to buy from you.
You best move the customer through the purchase funnel, from awareness to buy, when your promotions offer one clear, specific, memorable benefit tied to the product, place, price, packaging, or your people. The success of your promotions is significantly influenced by the purpose of your message.
Your target customer will never care as much about you or your business as they care about solving their problems. Your promotions must point out, identify, or focus on what your target customer might want from you and how you can help solve their problem.
Business success often comes down to communicating the right message to the right people at the right time. If you want to generate higher sales and more profits, you must consider which element of the marketing mix is most important for your promotional emphasis. You best articulate how you help your customers better than anyone else through your unique selling proposition (USP). The most effective USP’s exhibit the following 3 C’s:
- Clear. If your customers aren’t clear about who you are, what you stand for, and what value you bring to them, they aren’t going to bring you their business.
- Concise. If you’re somewhat clear, but tend to go on and on with your message, your customer will “tune out” your static noise, and take their business to someone who gets directly to the heart of what matters: the problem they are trying to solve.
- Compelling. Use your words to persuade your customers to take action. The best way to position yourself for a sale is to get your customer to respond to your call to action.
Use the 3 C’s in how you promote your business. The best way to both get your message right and to communicate it in a way that it gets picked up on is to know who is the best target for your message. When your target customer will most likely be open to your message, and where is the most effective medium to communicate your information? Lastly, you need to identify the why your target customer should be interested in your message.
Just as you use your thumb to grip something important to you, your promotions need to support the most crucial element of your marketing mix, which is the one most relevant to your target customer. If you message too broadly because you can’t decide what is most important to say, you will only confuse people. What’s worst is you will waste a lot of money confusing them.
The success of your promotional investments is powered by how well your messaging represents what is most important for your target customer to learn about your business. If you fail to communicate how you can help your target customer solve a problem, they aren’t likely to read your message or retain the information. If they don’t retain your message, the only sales you will make will be “impulse sales,” because your promotions will have no staying power.
By itself, promotion is not very useful. It must be directly related to what the target customer most values. It’s best to base your promotions on what is new or different about your business. It has to be significant enough for you to spend money communicating a focused message to your customers, or you should redirect the money you spend on promoting your business because you have nothing compelling to say.
