Want to Jump Start Your Sales? STOP Marketing! Part III of V

You must have wondered, how can NOT marketing increase sales? Let me clarify that a little more here.

You see, whatever your marketing message is, it has a cumulative effect on the minds of the prospective buyers. There is marketing the “right” message and there marketing the “wrong” message.

Actually, it’s okay to market even a wrong message, as long as it’s consistent and coherent. Then there is hope for you to get some interest from the prospective buyers.

The real danger is in marketing an incoherent message to your audience. How can you create a coherent marketing message for your business?

Adding to Confusion: A Confusing Jargon

When your prospective customer sees different messages from you at different times, they get confused. A typical response to a confusing message is… nothing. They don’t respond. For most of us, no response is worse than a wrong response. That’s why, it’s extremely important for you to have a cohesive message that you reinforce - often and through different media.

This can be done only if, before anything else, we, ourselves, are crystal clear about what we want to communicate to our audience.

This reinforcing of a message to your audience is called “branding.” Now branding is a concept that has been around for many, many years. The problem is that it has been overused. And it has lost its real meaning.

Today, for the most part, branding is used to mean “flashing a logo or an image to your audience so many millions of times.” Well, this has some truth to it, but really it is just a small part of the overall concept.

Branding, by definition, does not need images, pictures, stationary, logo or clever ad campaigns. Sure, these tools can enhance the message and make it more effective. But, what branding really needs is a good understanding of human psychology. With that, you can get your message across in even a few words.

When Self-Obsession is a Good Thing

We are bombarded with an average of about 3000 advertising messages a day! An average Joe or Jane does not have enough psychological energy to focus on any one of these messages. Also, we are competing with those who spend billions of dollars in advertising. Unless you have the similar amount of money in your budget, getting your audience to respond to you is a huge challenge.

There is hope though. The average Jane or Joe is also obsessed with one subject: herself or himself. We are a generation of deeply self-absorbed people. And for a marketer, that’s a good thing.

If we have a message that appeals to the average person in our target audience, in the terms that she can relate to at a very personal level, we are more likely to get a response from her.

A few examples of such a message are:

- “What would you do with two extra hours in your day – every day?” (We give you two extra hours a day that you currently don’t have.)

- Your shoes are shined in two minutes or less

- We help you get five times the profits, that last five generations or longer

- We help you uncover hidden channels to explosive profits

- With our cell-phones, salespeople in DelMarVa territory sell 30% more

A “Mission Statement” That Does Not Put People to Sleep: Possible?

One of the overly used terms we hear today is “mission statement” or “purpose statement”.

Let me ask you this: how many times have you read a mission statement that really got you excited? Did you remember it?

For most, the answers are: “never” and “no.”

Let’s face it, a lot of mission statements get yawns from the readers, if that. Most won’t get even a second look!

A message from your company could be a concrete, actionable, measurable “mission statement” that actually gets read by your prospective customers. Why? Because it is written in the terms that they can relate to.

Here are some examples of such a mission statement (translated from the messages above):

- Two extra hours a day for every business owner

- A two-minute shoeshine for a very busy executive

- Creating businesses with five times the profits that last five generations or longer

- To help businesses discover hidden channels to explosive profits

- 30% more sales for every sales person in Washington DC metro area

With a message like this, you don’t need to spend so much money and time on advertising. With minimal marketing activity, you can get people to respond to you and your products and services.

A study done by Eureka Ranch, a marketing firm founded by Doug Hall, the author of Jump Start Your Business Brain, shows that having a message like this can increase your marketing effectiveness by 300%! Meaning if you are getting 10 leads a month, with the same amount of marketing, you will get 30 leads per month. With everything else constant, you can increase your sales by 300%.

If this excites you:

- Invest some time regularly to find out what your customers get by doing business with you in specific terms that make sense in “their world.”

- Talk to your customers regularly to find out what they get by doing business with you. Make sure that you not just focus on the words but also their emotions: excitement, exhilaration, relief, calmness, relaxation etc.

- Look for ways to communicate those emotions and thoughts to your prospects in your marketing and prospecting activities.

- Always remember, words are the most basic tools we have to communicate with others. Do whatever you can to get your company’s core message down in 10 words or less.

- For upcoming free workshop by AMBICA on this subject, e-mail bhavesh@ambica.net or call me at 301-916-4015 Ext 12 or visit http://www.ambica.net/jump_start_your_business_brain.html.

Happy Success!
Bhavesh Naik.