One of the most fundamental principles of marketing is the idea that we need to send messages that our target market cares about and understands. This is a principle that seems so easy to understand when looking at other businesses and yet proves so difficult to apply when we turn the focus to our own messaging. And so today we will focus on a mantra to repeat anytime you work on marketing: Your Marketing Message Must Matter To Your Target Market.
I regularly teach marketing workshops for small business owners to talk about how to develop a brand. Today I want to share some anecdotes from these classes that may help you when thinking about YOUR brand.
For one nonprofit, I lead a marketing messaging class. We talk about principles of marketing, principles of taglines, and then workshop the taglines of the class. It is part of a two-month marketing series, so the business owners know each other well by the time we get to my class. Every time I have taught the class, someone raises a hand to have their tagline discussed with the group. And every time, that person reads the tagline aloud and their classmates shake their heads “no.” No matter how much time these brave souls spent working on the tagline, they consistently got stuck on language that did not resonate with their classmates as the real mission of the business. Your marketing message must matter to your target market.
Once, a woman came to me with a tagline about her food delivery service. It was “Thai food your way.” I said, ‘Oh, that’s great. So, you give people ingredients for Thai dishes and they assemble it to taste?” She looked confused. “No. I fully prepare the meals, and they just heat it up.” Now everyone in the room looked confused. That’s not what any of us thought she did from the message she was sending. In the end, we realized that what she was selling was home-cooked Thai food that could be prepared QUICK AND EASY. Not YOUR WAY. For people who don’t have a lot of culinary skill or time and like to eat Thai food, this was a great solution. This marketing message would matter to that target market.
Another time I reviewed business cards with a class. We talked about the principles of branding. One of the women in the class gave great feedback to everyone else. Then she asked me to look at her card. It was a card for a hair salon. There was a picture of a lavender field on it. “Why the lavender field?” I asked. “I just liked it,” she said. She didn’t use lavender products. She didn’t use essential oils. It didn’t match her other materials. She just liked lavender. But what was she telling me about her business? What was she telling her prospects? Your marketing message must make sense to your target market.
These are not unusual anecdotes. I have a story like this from every brand development workshop I have taught. I even have moments of uncertainty when I think about my own brand. I always come back to this mantra: Does this marketing message matter to my target market?
Remember that every choice you make when you communicate to your audience is sending them a message. Your choice of color, images, font, words, negative space, tone, message placement, who sends the message – it all matters. Every decision you make should be run through this filter of whether or not your target market will get it. Whether your target market will understand that you are speaking to them. Over time, it will become easier to make these decisions if you are in a good habit now.
Every choice you make when you communicate to your audience is sending them a message. #mktg Share on XIf sending the right message means investing in new collateral, do it. It costs too much to send the wrong marketing message to every prospect. Sending the right marketing message to the right audience over time will generate sales. Sending the wrong one will not.
Sending the right #marketing message to the right audience over time will generate sales. #smb Share on XSo next time you write a blog, update your website, redesign your business card, create a brochure, go live on Facebook, give an elevator speech, or design any other marketing message, make sure that every part of the way you deliver the message matters to your audience.
And if you want to work on defining your target market and you sell B2B, click here! If you sell B2C, click here!