Content that Connects
When putting together Marketing content, the brass ring we all reach for is the real connection. Something that grabs the reader/watcher/consumer, and sucks them in. One of the hardest parts of trying to do this can be realizing what you are really selling.
That may sound odd, but think for a moment. What do Mountain Dew commercials sell? If your answer was soda pop you would be wrong. The commercials are selling hip, and young, and edgy. They are selling risk taking. you will never see a Mountain Dew commercial do a taste test against another soda because they are not selling great taste. They know that their consumer wants to feel a little cooler, a little freer, and when they grab a Dew instead of a Sprite they do.
Similarly, if your product is high quality pasta dinners in freezer bags that you can pull out and warm up in minutes you have to ask yourself what you are really selling. It’s not pasta, peas or baby carrots. The real reasons people buy, the real deliverable is a happy family, a happy spouse, the appearance of being on top of things. That is the message your adds and pictures should convey.
Don’t be too wordy in your message. Make the pictures, the colors, the flow, and the mood of your add invoke an empathic response from the consumer as much as you can.
Ask yourself the normal marketing questions: What are my key value propositions; what differentiates me from my competitors; but also ask yourself: What does the consumer of this content like to believe about them self. If you have a product for sales and marketing people make it look professional if appropriate, but also make it look aggressive, edgy, hip, energetic. Sales and Marketing people love to believe this about themselves. It’s what they want to feel, what they want to convey.
Who is your market? What are you really selling? What should your customers feel like after they benefit from you and what you have to offer?

So I just got back from vacation in Norway for two weeks (wonderful experience BTW), and was completely slammed with stuff that needed to be done. Once I spent a week mowing through the backlog, I am now three weeks out from when I last wrote anything for this blog. It got me to thinking…
As I’m sure you can tell from my blog, I tend to think a fair amount about communicating. But really, communication is a means to an end, and then end is: relationships. I really think that our relationships are what ground us.
Your brand is your livelihood. As such, we all strive so hard to ensure that our messaging supports our brand, and that our brand inspires at an emotional level. Are we using the right colors? The right pictures? What does our website convey? How do people feel when they read it? It seems that to really stay consistent to our brand, we need to evaluate every aspect of our company and ask ourselves how it relates to our marketing, to the message we are trying to send.
There are lots of ways to market your products and services, but one that I want to touch on today is Mobile. When does it make sense to use mobile devices form marketing, and when is it too much hassle, and too much money for little return?
I have heard a lot of different people give ideas on what a web site needs to look like. Often times this advice comes in the form of “If I can’t tell what you do in 6 seconds”, or “If I can’t tell what you do from six feet away form the screen” when I look at the site, then it is wrong. I would put forth however that these types of generalizations stem form the same mindset that asks “who is your target?”
When people think about marketing they tend to think about getting out the good word, about telling the world how good they’ve done, or what neat stuff they cna bring to bear.
A number of years ago, I invited Steve Spencer to a lunch with former co-workers. At lunch we proceeded to do the usual catching up, talking about old times, and general talking about things that Steve had no connection with.
Okay, so you have a product. You have a brand you want to convey, and you want to make sure you do it in a way that people will respond to. When looking at your long term strategy for enforcing your brand, it is important to look at all three of the C’s and make sure they are in line: