Getting It Right

More and more, marketing is about sending the right message to the right person at the right time.  We are in a world inundated by information and interruptions, so more often than not, we are forced to ignore everything that does not matter or resonate.  There is a good reason, therefore, why “relevance” has become a new buzzword in marketing.

So, as marketers, how do we get it right?

• Always start with the objective – your business, personal, professional or marketing objective.  What is it you wish to communicate?  What action do you wish your message recipient to take?  Once you get this right (and refined), you can move on to the “How”.
• Based on a good understanding of your objective, you can now move to understand the audience.  You need to determine carefully what the characteristics are of the person(s) that would or should be interested in your message (and objective – i.e. product, service or other resource).
• Once you know the characteristics, determine whether you have the right tools to segment your entire contact database to identify these specific individuals in order to create your target list or pool.
• Now that you have clearly determined your objectives and the person(s) that you will be communicating to, it’s time to focus on the message and medium/media of choice for your communication.
• Here’s the key to the message getting read or received – it needs to resonate.  How do you make it resonate?   First, consciously, put yourself in the shoes of one or more recipients.  Clear your mind of you!  You don’t matter.  Only the individual who is about to receive your message.  Now, write down some key points that will matter to the recipient.   What are “your” pain points?  What will motivate or provide incentives to “you” to act?  Make a list of 5 to 7 points.
• Now, you have the meat – the primary content of the message.   Prioritize those points from most to least significant.   Try to use the most important point as your subject line, headline or title to get the attention of the recipient.  You have the raw material to begin crafting your message.   Based on the medium of communication [hint: the more ways you communicate the message (provided you are not overdoing it!), the more likely your message will receive the attention you think it deserves], your entire message may be a couple of lines (e.g. on a targeted display banner ad) or a couple of paragraphs (e.g. a targeted email message).
• A few hints about your message – brevity wins over length, bullets work well to make a point, a couple of graphics or pictures catch attention and the headline/title/subject line merits time and effort.
• If you can, create your own small focus group – colleagues, employees, friends, family, loyal customers and test out the messages.   You are testing for two key aspects – relevance and resonance.   Did they work?
• By now, you should have the message(s), the targeted list(s) or recipients and the media.  The last thing you need to determine is when and how often you want to communicate the message(s) through one medium or many.  This too needs to be a deliberate decision by you.  Put yourself in their shoes once again.  Timing wise, what seems optimimum, how many messages would irritate you, how many would be too few to take action.  Did that help?  Now, you are ready to go!

Some of you may be thinking – boy, that’s a lot of work to create a message.   But, think of the end objective.   What do you want to accomplish?  Who do you want to reach?   What do you want them to do once they receive your message?  The only way to success in this new world of over-abundance of everything, especially information, is to take the time to do it right upfront, so you spend less time wondering why nothing happened later.

Good e-marketing to you and hope you “get it right” always!

‍