Market a Better Life

Your marketing messages should address how you make your customers’ lives better—not how great your company and its products and services are.

We get it: You love what you do. (And we’re glad you do!)

If you didn’t love what you do, you’d probably look for some other occupation that stoked your energies and got you out of bed in the morning, raring to go.

For this reason, it’s incredibly tempting to crow about the amazing things your product can do and the superior way you perform your service. Just like a parent raising a child, your product or service is the most obviously amazing product or service—at least to you—and you absolutely must tell everyone you meet about everything it does.

Awesome.

And wrong, wrong, all wrong.

Though we do truly understand the impulse, we must caution you against focusing all your marketing on your product’s or service’s bells, whistles, and special angles that none of your competitors can match or that none of your potential customers have ever before seen.

All these things may be true, but few of them will compel your audience to act. And here’s why:

Your target audience cares only—and we mean only—about how your product or service makes its life better.

We hate to be the ones to break the news, but it’s true: Your target audience does not care about you.

Yes, each of the features you love so much has a benefit to your target audience. However, if you don’t describe these features in ways that speak directly to how your product or service improves lives, your marketing will fail.

Don’t geek out about your new automobile’s elegant and streamlined engineering. Tell me about how it will reduce the amount of time and energy I spend refueling. Even better: Tell me what I can do with the time and money I’ll save by buying your car.

Don’t tell me that you have experience and certifications in X, Y, and Z. Tell me how only three sessions with you will help me save—or make—15 percent more money quarter over quarter.

For example, a client of ours in the nursery business had some of the most innovative and technologically advanced greenhouses in the country. Their processes produced volumes of gorgeous flowering plants for a wide swath of the south-central United States. And while some of our behind-the-scenes snapshots and videos garnered a lot of interest from followers and fans, what really sold the business—and brought in the followers and fans in the first place—was showing people in the target audience how they could use the nursery’s plants to make their lives beautiful and to beautify the lives of people they knew.

As you craft the perfect marketing messages, you’ll find it all too tempting to fall back into the geek-out mode, wherein you rave about how your service or product works and how well designed it is. Just remember to catch yourself going in that direction—and course correct.

Trust us: We’d love to tell you all about the ins-and-outs of marketing strategy best practices and about our custom process for developing an efficient, effective, and measurable marketing strategy and plan for our clients. Even we have to remind ourselves that the reason people hire us isn’t our proprietary strategy-development process—but the results our strategies achieve for their businesses.

Speaking of which: Can we help you build yours?