Poor messaging = money bonfire
The Messagery's two Davids look at where to put your firebreaks
Eye-catching content is useless if it attracts the wrong readers.
Obvious, you might say. In which case, save yourself a couple of minutes and don’t read on.
Today’s pressure on marketing and content teams to simply ‘deliver’ encourages a ‘quantity versus quality’ mindset. This ensures that every opportunity is taken, every wave ridden and always, always, relentless delivery of content. The danger of this approach is that it’s often done in ignorance of the strategic core, product/service and issue level strategic messages the content should be reflecting.
This ‘blunderbuss marketing’ is the very opposite of targeted marketing. It’s a largely pointless approach. It reverses the adage of Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO) to Garbage Out/Garbage In (GOGI). Send silly messages, get silly respondents.
Stick with the unfocused approach and you will start burning money. Every inbound expression of interest needs to be processed. Every website registration requires relationship management. The precious nuggets of valuable leads and contacts have to be expensively mined. Even with marketing automation, someone still has to make judgements. In high-value/low-volume businesses that will be senior sales or sales support staff. The more ‘noise’ they have to deal with, the less time they spend doing their main jobs.
Furthermore, poor messaging can damage your business with misconceptions about who you are and what you do. It can create a false impression of your company that’s then passed on to others. Correcting a misconception costs more time and effort (i.e. money) than creating the right impression in the first place. Cruelly, the better you are at executing your marketing campaigns and placing content, the more these resulting costs increase. All your carefully nurtured audiences and potentially polluted channels will now be replicating your misleading messages.
You may assume that you’re close enough to your business, product or service to understand instinctively what always needs to be said. That’s fair enough, but does this apply to all of your colleagues, your agencies and your other advisors? Do you find that you have to spend time briefing them for each separate activity? More money…
A solid set of strategic messages (core, product/service and issues), will shape and guide your campaign and tactical messaging and significantly reduces your costs.
These will be your firebreaks.
Picture credit: Dee at pixabay