Here’s a quick analogy of your audience’s attention.
Imagine you find yourself at the hardware store staring down the plumbing aisle, overwhelmed. Fittings, couplings, glues and mysterious tools approach you from all sides.
Your gal is at home cleaning water off the floor since a wild geyser suddenly appeared in your kitchen. Your evening Netflix and chill date is ruined.
A full eternity goes by down that aisle when you see someone lean into your field of vision talking to you.
It’s a store associate doing their job. Asks if you need help
Politely turning them down you think, “Good God. I have no idea how long they were standing there.”
What’s this have to do with anything?
Well… your target audience is like the poor sap having to fix his kitchen plumbing. And your marketing message is like the store associate trying to do his job. Everyone’s life is so jam packed that noticing anything even slightly irrelevant seems to be impossible.
We’re all up to our ears in ads and marketing messages. You might not even be aware of that fact but we are. Because we’ve become EXPERTS at ignoring irrelevant or boring content. I mean we’re absolute black belts at it.
How many ads do you click on? How many do you read? Do you even remember any of them?
There are hundreds flashed in front of you everyday. You would think with those odds some would stick out.
But hardly any of them ever do.
Don’t jump the gun and get me wrong by thinking that marketing doesn’t work now that I’ve pointed that out. Marketing is superbly effective.
Everything that you buy was successfully marketed to you somehow. We all buy what we buy because we were sold on those things. Marketing is just the bridge that gets us there.
But most marketing you see is a copy of a copy of a copy.
Massage therapists are good at massaging. Mechanics are good at wrenching. Lawyers are good at lying–I mean litigating. They aren’t experts at marketing their services.
So they look to the desk next to them and copy the homework off their peers. It’s an economy-wide game of copycat and the commonplace marketing message is what you get… A misaligned, out of frame and blurry Xerox version of an ad that everyone and their distant cousin uses.
If you want your ads and marketing to get ignored, here’s a list of things to include in your messaging.
Who you are.
How long you’ve been in business.
How great you are.
The values and principles you stand on.
Where the future of your company is headed.
Those get you ignored because that’s what YOU care about. They might be great to you, but you aren’t selling to yourself. (Unless you’re laundering money. In which case none of this matters to you anyways.)
But since you’re selling to other people it’s a fantastic idea to gear the elements towards THEM.
Imagine you’re back at that hardware store and that same associate now has a shovel in hand and a garden hose thrown over his shoulder.
He goes, “Is this what you need, sir?”
You see how completely out of pocket that scenario is?
Automotive shops don’t try to upsell their audience on knee surgery after an oil change. Once they’re done screwing in all your light bulbs, electricians won’t try to entice you on a one week all expenses paid trip to the Bahamas either.
That’s what it’s like when you sell on anything but the solutions you offer.
People don’t care about your company, unfortunately. They care about getting their problems fixed.
Your target audience has specific problems. Using those very problems as the language you speak in your ads will be like calling out the number to a raffle ticket they hold. You can basically call them out by name when you present them a fix to the issues they’re having.
Knowing their struggles and then letting them know you have just what they need is a far superior marketing message than tying a bow on your employee handbook, slapping some of those core values on top of a stock photo and calling it an ad.
Get your audience’s attention by getting to know your customers and you’ll have a lasting edge on your competition. You’ll come across as customer oriented right out of the gate. And all those previous elements you marketed from will shine by themselves without having to mention them.
The next ads you see, before ignoring them, stop for a moment and look at them a little closer. Notice how they drone on about something completely irrelevant to you. Or how slowly they get to their point
Make sure that your marketing does the exact opposite.
Speak to your audience about them, what they’re going through and how you can help them. That’s the secret sauce to a world class recipe.
Care for more marketing tips? Check out some other topics we cover here. And if you’re thinking about how to get more customers for less dollars take a look at our Meta guide.
