Never Get a ”Real„ Job (24 page)

Say what you do, and do what you say
. Sending out mixed signals, incoherent messages, or half-assed offers will only do one thing: guarantee that
no one
will care about your brand. Furthermore, if you don’t make it clear who you are and what you offer, you’ll be leaving yourself open to attack, potentially enabling naysayers and competitors the opportunity to control your message.

For example: “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC.” Need I say more?

You
must control your message with relevancy, uniformity, and delivery. But first, you must create an active brand message to establish your principles, define your brand and—most importantly—put your business on track to generate immediate revenue.

An active brand message is a one-sentence pitch that makes a promise to prospects followed by a promotion guaranteeing that promise. The efficacy of your active brand message will hinge on this one-liner, which should immediately convey what your business does and the results it can provide. The purpose is to attract customers and fuel word-of-mouth. You’ll use your active brand message in your marketing materials, consumer touch points, and sales presentations. This sentence should proclaim your business’s promise and inspire prospects to hire you.

For example, a math tutoring service might have a brand message that says “Subtract difficulty from math tests in NYC.” A gardening and lawn care service’s tagline might be “Grow with us without wasting green.”

Use the following five questions to help construct your one-liner:

Write a clear and easy-to-read five- to eight-word sentence. Be sure to communicate the value your company can deliver. Avoid being overly clever, witty, or intellectual; you run the risk of customers not getting it, not caring to get it, or not liking what you have to say. Most importantly, don’t just say something because it sounds cool. You don’t have time or money to spout lofty ideals, nor do you possess the ability to shift pop culture in your favor with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. You need your one-liner to spur business activity, attract interested prospects and produce revenue—
now
.

The next thing you’ll need to do is match the appropriate promotion with your one-liner. Think of your promotion as an incentive meant to catch consumers’ eyes and support the promise you’ve issued in your one-liner with some kind of guarantee.

For example: The math tutoring service might back up the “Subtract difficulty from math tests in NYC” message with a money-back grade improvement guarantee. The gardening and lawn care service’s tagline of “Grow with us without wasting green” could be verified with an offer to plant a free tree or flower garden with their clients’ first purchase.

Carefully determine how you will guarantee the promise you make in your one-liner. Since longevity is vital to your promotion, the offer should have staying power, versatility, and be catchy enough for consumers to easily remember when they want to spread the word about your company.

Make certain that your active brand message is a functional, revenue-generating marketing tool—not an exercise in creativity. Say what you do, know what you do, do what you say. Relate to the needs of the maximum number of people in your niche marketplace. Remember, any business can claim to be the best. Those who back up those statements with action, service, and concrete assurances truly
are
the best.

Diversify your brand message into targeted marketing messages
. Saturating every channel at your disposal with the same exact marketing message isn’t just lazy; it’s insulting. Assuming that a Facebook fan and a general passerby are the same type of consumer because they both use some form of social media is like saying that a football fan and a hockey fan are the same because they both like sports.

In marketing, one size does not fit all—ever. The marketing message for a prospect typing your keywords into Google should be completely different in tone and approach than the one you’ll use for flyers that you hand out on a street corner. Just because your niche marketplace is filled with multiple groups of like-minded individuals doesn’t mean that all of them will interact with your marketing experience the same way, at the same time, or with the same intentions.

Before you commit to a marketing tactic, try to figure out how, when, and why prospects will interact, react, and connect with its content. Take everything into consideration—from the physical tool itself, to the actual location where the message will be delivered, to the actions that prospect will exercise, to the recipients themselves—before spending a
single
dollar or minute on any marketing tactic. Although it’s important to maintain a uniform brand message, it’s also vital to tailor your message and supportive offers to your specific targets’ and distribution channels’ needs. The better you are at attracting and pursuing your niche audiences—with the right messages delivered through the right channels—the higher your sales conversion rates will be.

Get the right tool for the job
. Just as your marketing messages need to be customized, so do the distribution channels you use to send it. Consider all available options when determining the best tool for getting the job done. If your goal is to convert mothers walking down your local boulevard into impulse purchasers, then hiring a clown to make balloons for kids and handout coupons might do the trick. If you find the need to call passive community members into action, putting door hangers on their front doors might be the way to go.

Let your brand message determine the appropriate channels, and the channels inform your decisions about which marketing messages and tactics to use.

Think revenue, not brand marketing
. If you assume that your logo, brand name, and contact information will form
any
kind of impression in your prospects’ minds, you are naïve. There is absolutely no excuse for you to do “brand marketing” just to get the word out about your company name. A cool brand image or eye-catching design work means nothing unless it achieves something—a sale, a referral, or lead information.

Whether you create flyers, online ads, or brochures, you need to determine the purpose of the marketing materials you produce to ensure the best chance of producing your intended results. Each asset should have an objective and a goal, and each component—from headline and copy text to point of distribution—should be constructed with accomplishing those objectives and goals in mind.

For instance, the objective of a printed flyer for a dog-walking company might be to quickly alert dog lovers in local dog parks about its existence, and get prospects to share their contact information on the spot for future dog-walking services. Keeping this purpose in mind, it might be most effective to create and distribute a smaller, business card–sized flyer that touts the company’s brand message, basic service information, and a special offer for a free dog treat for the card’s recipient if they provide their contact information on the spot.

Consider the following five questions when developing each marketing tactic:

I can’t tell you whether it’s best for your business to send out mailings, spearhead e-mail campaigns, buy Google Ads, put door hangers on residential buildings, or do all of the above. After all, I’m not the expert in your niche marketplace; you are. What I
can
tell you is that no matter what tactics, channels, or deliverables you choose, your methodology will be the same.

Don’t just market for the sake of marketing; market for
results
. Your marketing messages need to draw attention, provide context, and encourage consumers to interact with your brand immediately. Have specific reasons and set goals for spearheading an initiative—not because you feel you “have to market”—to make every second and dollar spent on marketing count.

Call to action, not inaction
. Getting someone to pay attention to your marketing message isn’t enough for it to be deemed a success. In fact, garnering attention without generating a single lead or sale as a result is nothing short of failure. You had a potential customer—and he slipped through your fingers.

Without the appropriate calls to action in your messages, all of your hard work in gaining a prospect’s attention will be for nothing—and your newfound brand exposure will be rendered worthless. To that end, your messages must inspire action and participation.

To be effective, everything you do, say, and produce must encourage leads to contact your company, submit their info, make an immediate purchase, or refer others to your service, product, or offer. Anything else is a waste of time and money. When you devise your call-to-action messaging and modes of communication, do all of the thinking
for
your prospect. Envision the entire exchange that she will have with your marketing messages—from the means by which the message will attract her attention, to how she’ll consume the message, to the tools needed to enable a connection between her and your brand. Keep the her’s mood and the activity in which she is likely engaged before, during, and after her encounter consistent with your message.

After careful consideration, determine how you can make your service relevant to her life in that moment. Think of ways to sweeten the deal; perhaps a free ice-cold lemonade on a hot day will get some foot traffic to your “Burger Boogle” stand. Maybe offering a free, relevant white paper or how-to guide on your Web site in exchange for a lead’s contact information will generate sign-ups.

Give your leads a reason to contact you. Find the sweet spot between creativity, marketing messages, and special offers to trigger a response.

Do what it takes to get noticed
. How many advertisements do you see in a day? Probably hundreds, if not thousands—if not tens of thousands. Yet how many do you
remember
? It is likely that you remember few, if any at all. Now here’s the really challenging question: How will you avoid creating one of those insignificant marketing moments that you encounter and subsequently forget every day?

You don’t need to spend much money to stand out. Nor do you need some overpriced marketing firm to create a massive campaign. Instead, you need to focus on smaller moments that add up to one big success.

A home-improvement company I know of achieved great success with funny T-shirts that read, “Got wood? I’ll nail it!”—a short brand message, phone number, and e-mail address followed this humorous headline. The tactic was highly effective because it was inexpensive, it struck up conversations, and it turned a simple shirt into a lead-generating mechanism.

Play to your consumer’s senses. Trigger their emotions to form connections and get responses. Put your brand out there in a fun, experiential, or shocking way to generate genuine interest and intrigue. Offer the unexpected or pair the absurd with the ordinary. Many people shy away from accepting handouts on street corners. However, if a Web-design firm hired a flyer distributor to stand on a street corner yelling about how much people should hate flyer distributors—while handing out a flyer that read, “Don’t you hate when people hand you flyers like this?” along with a relevant offer that tied into the message, then the message’s impact would be much stronger and offer a greater chance of success.

Content is king, but creativity is queen
. The package in which your marketing message comes in is often just as important as the message itself. Anytime your name, logo, or other branded materials go out into the world, they are representing your entire brand. Ugly designs and grammar-inhibited phrases can change prospects into haters and skeptics in less than three seconds. A powerful message that is supported by a great offer and quality service can easily be diluted by a design that looks like a color blind kindergartner sketched it with a crayon.