The Three Deadly Sins You’re Committing with Your Marketing Message
October 8, 2016
Your marketing message matters. All the best products, features, and services your company offers will mean nothing unless your customer says “yes” to them. That means you need to get the marketing message right across the entire sales cycle, from demand generation to sales enablement and beyond. Make sure you are not derailing your sales process by committing any of the three deadly marketing message sins.
1. Your story is all about you
One of the most important success factors in the buying cycle is the story you tell your prospects. Do you force prospects to understand and love your company story, or are you engaging them in a compelling dialogue about their story? The starring role in your marketing message has to go to the customer. Your company and offering play a supporting role in moving the plot of the customer’s story forward to the happy ending. You need a message that not only differentiates you from competitors, but also convinces the decision-maker that she needs to do something different.
2. You focus on brand positioning rather than customer messaging
Brand positioning – how we want to be known, what we promise to do, and what customers like about us – typically becomes a 30,000-foot hyperbole that rarely sets you apart from the competition. Many companies test whether customers like their brand position but they don’t test whether it will change behavior. Your marketing message needs to offer a compelling story that will create an impact by helping customers understand what they want or need and get them excited enough to do something different – and make them willing to go through the pain of change.
3. You churn out content without a distinct point of view
Marketers are constantly looking for ways to create the quality of content needed, in a timely fashion, to fill all the holes in the demand-generation and sales-enablement content map. But rarely is the focus on making the content more distinctive. Your content is an extension of your marketing message and to be truly effective – to drive action – you need to show the relevant impact that the latest trends, issues, challenges, problems, and changes will have on the outcomes that customers desire. And then it must show them how your organization can help them avoid risks and maximize opportunities.
So, how do you avoid these deadly sins and develop effective marketing messages? Corporate Visions can help. Our Power Positioning helps you set your organization apart from competitors and compels the customer to make a decision for you.
