Marketing often seems like a mysterious art that requires all sorts of precise and difficult insights, if it’s to be done effectively.
While it’s certainly true that there are all sorts of marketing tricks, data gathering strategies, and insights that aren’t totally self-evident, and that require a good deal of thought and research to come to terms with, the basic fundamental nature of marketing is actually pretty straightforward.
Ultimately, “marketing” just means identifying a perceived need or problem on the part of the potential customer, and then explained to them in a convincing way why your service offers the best solution for that problem.
Here are a few tips for conveying your services effectively to your customers.
-
Emphasise the benefits, not the numbers
One important distinction that needs to be made, whenever you’re trying to convey the benefits of your business to your prospective customers, is that you need to focus on the actual “benefits” and not on the “numbers.”
This can seem to be a bit of a strange distinction, but think of it like this: when someone is reading through your website because they need an air conditioning unit, they are looking to address the problem of overheating in their home or office.
For that reason, writing that says things like “with our units, you can introduce a constant cool breeze to your living room on even the hottest summer days,” is much more captivating than writing that is purely descriptive, such as “we sell X, Y, and Z units with A, B, and C specs.”
By the same token, a firm of truck accident lawyers who provide focused legal representation would need to emphasise the benefits of focused and effective accident representation, in a way that was emotionally relevant to their clients.
The principle same applies for every other business, too.
-
Always aim to communicate in a concise way, with minimal jargon
Generally speaking, people are less and less patient these days with long, drawn-out, and rambling descriptions that are heavy in jargon.
If you want to effectively communicate the potential benefits of using your services, then you should aim to be as concise and direct as possible. Use as few words as you can to say what you need to, and make those words easy for a non-specialist reader to understand.
If you don’t do this, expect many prospective customers to click away from your website in irritation.
-
Wherever possible, show, don’t tell
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” is a saying that we’ve all heard a thousand or more times before. And a similar idea is conveyed by a maxim used by authors; “show, don’t tell.”
Wherever possible, use case studies, testimonials, and video and photo demonstrations of your products and services in order to drive the point home. It’s always very easy for a business to talk up a big game about what they can offer, but producing examples simply helps to prove the point, drive the message home much more effectively, and appeal to a much broader audience.
