Are Your Customers the Heroes of Your Marketing Messages?
Blurb, Book, & Blog: All about the customer
Have you been talking about yourself? Or, is your message focused on those you serve?
Blurb:
Your customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves.
– Joe Pulizzi
Book:
New York Times best-selling author Donald Miller uses the seven universal elements of powerful stories to teach listeners how to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses.
Blog:
The temptation in marketing is to talk about yourself. Talking about your company usually includes a laundry list of your features:
- Year founded/Number of years in business
- Size of company/Number of employeesQuantity of products/Square footage of warehouse
- Services/Laundry list of products
- These messages are often interspersed with “promises of greatness” that you are making about yourself.
- “We have the best people”
- “Our products are the best”
- “Great choice to make your life better”
- “We are the experts”
- “We have what you want”
Well, there are a few challenges with this marketing approach.
You do not have any credibility when you are telling someone else how great you are. In addition to being pretty self-serving, that message just won’t have any basis in fact. It’s pure opinion.
Also, you fall victim to the “you don’t know me” complaint – which is fair and valid. How do you know if your products & services can actually make their life better? How can you be sure that you have what they want? If your ads are so busy talking at them, then you aren’t taking the time to listen to them.
And, of course, you are making the most deadly mistake of all. By focusing on this laundry list of your features, instead of actual benefits to them, you are ensuring that your ads will not engage with the target audience or form an emotional connection with them.
Ultimately, the only messages that are going to be effective are when you can tell the stories of your target audience. And tell them in a way that features your target audience as the hero. You can spend less money and reach more people when you focus on building your brand.
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RUSSO is a strategic branding agency that uses consumer insight to change the conversation; forming emotional connections with the target audience. To learn more, click HERE to learn more about our process, RAZOR BRANDING.
