Marketing is all about getting your message out to as many potential customers as possible. Your marketing strategy must contain research on your target markets, the possible avenues for your marketing campaigns, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and why you have decided to adopt the strategy you have. It also needs to define what your message is and why people should be listening to it. In this blog post, learn about the importance of your marketing message.

The Importance of Your Marketing Message

Why your message matters

Your message is what sets you apart from your competition. You could be one of many companies that sells deluxe chocolates, all of which use master chocolatiers and organic cocoa. Even though these are important elements of your offer, if you base your marketing on them you won’t stand out from the crowd. You need to identify your unique selling proposition (USP), the element of your business that differs from everyone else. Then you need to sum this up in a form that communicates what is special about you to the people who are likely to be interested in what you are offering.

How to choose the right message

Say for example you deal in real estate. There are likely to be many other realtors in your area, so what can you do to differentiate yourself? First, see what the competition is doing – it’s no good coming up with a brilliant idea and getting all your marketing prepared only to discover that one of your rivals has been offering pretty much the same thing for the last few years. Then think about what people want. It could be that you can offer a service that guarantees to avoid an aspect of selling property that realtors have a bad name for. Or you could appeal to an almost universal pleasure for most people of saving tax, by linking up with a 1031 exchange property service. You could then use the fact that you can not only sell a property but save capital gains tax for your clients as well.

Avoiding the wrong message

You should avoid offering something you can’t deliver, or it will cause you all sorts of problems down the road. If you run an online store and use a courier service to deliver orders, you can’t say that you’ll guarantee next day delivery one hundred percent of the time. It’s not realistic, and it raises expectations from customers that wouldn’t have existed if you’d said you aim to deliver next day but have a disclaimer that says you can’t guarantee it. By diversifying and partnering with multiple carriers and courier services, you can improve your reliability and mitigate potential delivery delays, providing a better customer experience.  Don’t lie about where your products come from, or how they’re made, or the qualifications of your staff. Not only is this unethical, but you also run the risk of being exposed in the lie and facing legal action and the loss of your reputation.

Large companies spend millions of dollars every year on advertising campaigns that are carefully designed to send out exactly the right message and interest exactly the right people. You might feel envious of the vast marketing budgets they have, but in reality, it’s all proportionate, and it is just as vital for them to get their message right as it is for you.