Six principles to achieve a winning marketing direction

When you come to planning the marketing approach for your product or service, these are the six key questions to ask yourself, to make sure you get the best possible result.

1. What’s the ‘hook’ to make people interested and want to find out more?
Use creativity to catch people’s attention. Get them to spend time looking at your offer and create a desire within them to want to learn more. So what’s inherently interesting and special about your product or service, to make them want to do this?

2. Having ‘hooked’ people to start with, now’s the time to sell the benefits.
People buy benefits, not features. Benefits are what a product or service will do for them. That could be emotional, something communicating status. Practical, a benefit that is time saving. Or convenience; such as we deliver to you. Whatever people buy, they do so because of benefits. So the question to ask, from the consumer’s perspective, is “What’s in it for me”? The major benefit should follow from the ‘hook and don’t promote more than one or two benefits to start with.

3. Make sure your features and benefits are as believable as possible.
Write them in such a way that they will not be questioned and simply accepted. For a paint Company it might be a trusted Interior Designer saying something like, “I use xyz paint with kryptonite, because it quickly dries to a rock hard, smooth finish, avoiding dust and brush marks, giving a professional result every time”.

4. Get people’s attention.
People filter advertising out, unless it has something of interest to them. But avoid the creativity trap that makes the advertisement more interesting than the product it’s promoting. You don’t want people remembering the ad. and either associating it with the wrong product or failing to recall it at all!

5. Give people a ‘Call to Action’.
Be very clear about what you want them to do next. Call-in, email, text or phone for more information. Give them something free in return, as a thank-you for doing this. Tell people exactly what to do next, or some will do nothing even when interested.

6. Check your creativity works and that you are communicating clearly.
Make sure readers get the message and the whole message at that. Make sure there isn’t room for misunderstandings, even when they are reading it whilst doing other things. If 15% fail to get the right message that’s a lot of misinformed people that you are paying to promote to – you want 100% understanding.

Finally, compare your finished advertisement, commercial, letter, or brochure against the original creative approach. Does the idea still hold up against these six principles? If it doesn’t, then rethink the idea so that it does.

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