The more thinking and engineering that go into technology, products and services, the better they will perform (or be perceived to perform). But when it comes to marketing, sophistication and complexity muddy up your messages.

If you have an important message to convey, keep it simple, even if there are nuances. Why? Because the rest of us are mostly babes in the woods. Remember that only you think exactly the way you do and can perfectly connect your own dots. Your job is to simplify it all for the rest of us!

What about the nuances that really differentiate us, you might ask? If nuance is what differentiates your product or service, then your messages should be all about nuance. If a unique aspect of your business must be fully understood by your audience for them to take action, make it the primary message.

If complex, build your message in stages.

Be prepared to articulate every granular detail of your value delivery but save those details until your audience wants or needs to know them.

A Simple 4-Step Approach

If you need to make your message understandable and actionable, there’s a methodology you can use called AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action). To apply AIDA in your marketing messages and throughout your selling process, take your prospect through these communication stages:

Attention – Make your audience notice and listen. Make a bold, singular promise.

Interest – Once listening, build interest in how you will enrich your customer. Reveal some key features that will help them. You can further differentiate your offering with nuance and sophistication as long as your prospect wants to remain engaged. This is really the make or break stage because interest can be lost as quickly as gained. You must move them into wanting your product, or there’s no sale.

Desire – One way to know if your prospect has reached the “desire” stage is by the questions they ask. If the questions focus on recommended service levels, budget ranges, or what implementation involves, you and your prospect have reached the closing stage of the sale and are ready for…

ACTION – Unless your message is acted upon, why bother with branding, great web design and advertising? Why have salespeople? Your calls to action can be anything from e-commerce or contact links on your website to full-blown contract negotiations, depending on what you’re selling.

It’s best to hold your most sophisticated or complex product/service benefits for when you may need them, such as convincing a senior engineering team that your technology is superior. Give them the building blocks to decide for themselves.

Provide the Navigation

In marketing, the complex features do belong somewhere on your website with a clear navigation path. If your home and landing pages have a strong primary message, your visitors will go deeper to learn what they need to know, and hopefully place an order or call you with questions.

Content is gold.

You have limited mind space and attention spans to work with. Avoid muddying the water by keeping your initial marketing message simple. A powerful first impression can set the ball rolling from attention to ACTION faster than you expect.

The post Keep marketing simple! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

There’s nothing new about emphasizing the value you provide over the list of features and benefits your competitors will promise to match. This is sales 101 which, in actuality, is practiced by a minority of salespeople, marketing directors and business owners. Most of them still talk about “our people” and “our in-house capabilities” and “our superior customer service” when dealing with prospective customers. This is totally understandable and the natural “go-to” position.

While people, capabilities and service might all be great, they can all be duplicated so price becomes the most important factor in choosing a vendor. You need to shift your language from your greatness to their goals being fulfilled!

Change your language from describing your products, services and key features to illustrating the marked improvements your customers’ experience. You will help them improve their services, please their customers, gain more new customers, save more money, better engage their employees, increase profits and bolster sustainability, to name a few strong talking points.

Go ahead and try this at home!

I’ve developed a simple exercise to help you shift your language and change your business for the better. By way of example, you will easily figure out how to make your marketing communications and sales scripts work much better.  Instead of making you busier with more quote requests and sales haggling, your messages will attract prospects who already feel they want to work with you. Your words will paint a much prettier picture of them in the future and they will want to go there.

Let’s examine two different industry examples of my Value Proposition Exercise. One is for contract manufacturers and the other for Accounting Firms – CPAs. On the left are common product and service features and on the right are their corresponding values to the customer. Care to guess which set of words works better in sales and marketing?

Fully contemplate the question asked and then compare how you would want your customers and prospects to think of you.

The difference in commodity (scarcity) thinking and value (abundance) thinking is plain to anyone. When you have conversations with prospective customers in the “language of love” instead of the language of “me too,” you’ll notice that prospects will more often close the deal themselves instead of you fighting for the order.

I urge you to try this exercise for your own unique business. If you struggle for the right concepts and words, feel free to contact me. I’m happy to assist you in building a more powerful brand identity to better distinguish the unique value you bring to the table.

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