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Marketing for 2017 Message & Medium

Your marketing message and medium are key to actually reaching potential customers.
Your marketing message and medium are key to actually reaching potential customers.

What’s your marketing strategy for 2017? No doubt as you head into the fourth quarter of the year, you’re thinking about next year, and how you’re going to grow your business.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details when you start planning for next year, but let’s take a moment and simplify the conversation.

There are two deceptively simple questions you should ask yourself as you think about attracting new customers in 2017 and beyond.

  • 1. What should I say?
  • 2. Where and how should I say it?

The message and the medium. What’s the message, and what’s the medium?

Crafting a Message

We live in a world that’s saturated with advertising. There are messages everywhere. Nearly every medium is already very crowded. The average person is barraged with more than 5,000 ads or brand impressions every day. Only 30 years ago, that number was only about 500 per day.

As a small business owner, it can be really intimidating to think about how to be heard in the cacophony of 5,000 daily ad impressions.

As a shed builder, you’re probably thinking, “How in the world can I be in front of the right person, and say the right thing, at the right time, so that when they make the once- or twice-in-a-lifetime decision to buy a shed, they will think of me?”

Take heart: Most times the human desire for connection trumps the bright blinking and blaring noise of 5,000 impressions per day. In order to survive, our brains tune out most of the noise and only pay attention to the things that we deem valuable or different or that stand out.

A speaker that I admire, C.J. Casciotta, says, “In a sea of same, weird wins.” That’s right. Against the backdrop of white noise that is all those ads and brand impressions, you can capture someone’s imagination by knowing what you’re about, what’s different about you, and telling that story in a way that’s different from the crowd.

There is an old Japanese proverb that most certainly would not serve the modern marketer very well: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In general, the Japanese culture values conformity, sameness—not standing out as different. What experts like Casciotta know is that the nail that sticks out might actually trip us up a little, make us slow down, pause briefly, and pay attention.

Fortunately for you, you have the story within you to capture the imagination of your customers. You may just need to uncover it.

The Importance of Stories

Every decision we make is in some way influenced by a story, a narrative. Human beings are storytelling and story consuming beings. Consider:

• Christians live their lives along a great narrative that begins in a garden, introduces a Messiah, and ends in a great city of light. The Christian’s life is animated by the principles and teachings revealed in this story.

• Buddhists are instructed by the narrative of the Four Noble Truths, as Buddha taught. That suffering is an innate part of the human existence.

• A nation is bound together in part by the stories of its founding. A great deal of national pride is motivated by the stories we tell about how our nation started, how it grew, and where we’re going.

The stories we tell influence everything we do. Stories communicate values. They influence the clothes we buy, the food we eat, the houses we build.

The storage sheds we buy, or don’t buy

Apple didn’t become one of the most valuable companies in the world by telling us about the slabs of glass and aluminum they build. They told us the story of how creative we can be, of what we can build, of our place in the world, when the human spirit intersects with these highly designed computers and mobile devices.

Uncover Your Story

Take time to reflect on what makes your business unique. Begin to uncover your unique story.

It’s tempting when you’re starting to plan what to say to jump right into the features, advantages, and benefits, or promises of great quality or low price. Resist this temptation—customers hear that from everyone. That won’t make you stand out. What makes you weird?

Your prospective customers are already barraged by so many messages, so you won’t stand out if you simply tout better siding, a nicer roof, or “good quality.”

Start by asking yourself these questions:

• What are my core motivating principles?

• Why do I get up every morning and do what I do?

Don’t get tripped up in thinking that your motivation is money. Money is an outcome, not a “why.” Money is the result of having added value to someone’s life, it’s not a core motivating principal.

So why do you get up every morning to do what you do?

• You may be carrying on the legacy of your father and instilling the values he taught you to your own children.

• You may be improving the lives of your employees by teaching them to do great work in a healthy workplace.

• You may be inventing new markets, new ways to use your products, or new ways to build and deliver those products.

What do you do, and who do you do it for?

Now that you know why you do what you do, and you’re able to say what you do, and who you do it for, you have the bones of a good story.

Tell Your Story

It’s important to tell your story in a time and place that your potential customers will notice. Fortunately, technology has made that easier than it’s ever been. There are many tools and platforms that are free or very inexpensive to use where you can tell your story directly to your potential customers, without going through the traditional gatekeepers
like publishers, ad agencies, etc.

Here are some important places where you should consider telling your story:

YOUR WEBSITE. It’s a forgone conclusion that you have to have a website now. More than 80 percent of people say they don’t make a major purchase without first doing online research. If you don’t have an online presence that tells your story, you’ll miss out on all of those shoppers.

Make sure your website is “mobile responsive.” This just means that when your website is loaded on a small screen like a phone that it is easy to navigate and read. The vast majority of your potential customers have a smartphone in their pocket. They expect to be able to learn about your business on their schedule. You should take the opportunity to influence them there.

Make sure that your full-sized website isn’t what shoppers experience when they visit your site on a mobile device.

FACEBOOK ADS. Many small business owners are frustrated over the low reach they have on their business Facebook page. Facebook changed the news feed algorithm so that only 3-6 percent of your fans see your updates, unless you pay for ads or boosted posts. Don’t let that put you off. It’s no surprise that Facebook has turned into a “pay to play” platform now. This has been their intent for years.

Fortunately, Facebook is still a powerful tool for a shed builder. The amount of data that Facebook has on your potential customers is unparalleled, and their ads are very inexpensive when compared with Google or other digital ad platforms. Because Facebook knows so much about everyone online, they’re able to get your ads in front of the right eyeballs at a very reasonable price. Visit business.facebook.com to learn more.

INSTAGRAM. Instagram is still mostly free for businesses to use. You can still reach your Instagram following organically, and you should take advantage of it. People love image rich content, and Instagram’s 600 million-strong user base is evidence of it. Share pictures of people using your sheds, building your sheds, delivering your sheds—whatever lines up with your company’s unique story.

Instagram recently rolled out “Live Stories.” It’s a really immersive way to communicate with your followers. You can pull out your smartphone and tell little snippets of your story as you go throughout the day, and your fans will feel like you’re talking directly to them. It’s a really, really powerful way to connect to people and make sure they think of you when they’re ready to buy a shed.

LOCAL SEO. Make certain that your business shows up well in search results. People search for products and services on the go or at their computer, and they will often ignore you if they don’t find you in the search results. A big part of your local search engine placement is making sure that your business “citations” are consistent across the web. All this means is that every online database has the exact same information about your business: name, address, phone number, hours, etc. Google, Facebook, Yelp, HotFrog, Manta, and YellowPages are just a few of the many online directories that power local search.

An online tool that is helpful to check your business citations is moz.com/local. They have a paid service, but you can also use the tool for free, just to highlight errors which you can then correct.

INFLUENCER MARKETING. In many communities there are local celebrity figures that may have some of the same audience you desire. Perhaps they are a radio or TV host with a focus on home improvement, gardening, or DIY projects. Maybe they are an author, artist, or other well known figure with a group of fans who may be interested to know about you.

Identify some influencers that you see that might align well with your own story. You can approach them and pitch them on perhaps doing a trade, where they share your story with their fan base in exchange for a shed.

One idea: a DIY blogger could do all of his or her DIY projects in or around the shed you provided, giving you a great deal of targeted exposure all year long.

Of course, there are many other places to tell your story, and we’ve just scratched the surface with these suggestions, but perhaps this can jog your thought process as you plan for a successful 2017.

Observe, Measure, Adapt

As you hone in on what makes you unique, or weird, and you begin getting that story out there, make sure you’re diligent in observing what works and what doesn’t. Find your voice, your story. Take some calculated risk and tell that story in a medium that you can do some testing and observing. One way you can do that is through simple A/B testing (comparing the performance of one version of an ad or web page to another), or perhaps using things like trackable phone numbers.

Tracking and measuring can be done in non-digital media too. If you decide to try newspaper ads, make sure to include a clear call to action—preferably one that can be measured. Use an inexpensive trackable phone number, or a specific website URL that you can gauge the response.

As you measure these efforts for a defined time period, make steady adaptations to take advantage of what you’re learning. The process can seem slow at first, but eventually it picks up speed, and your story gains legs. You begin to connect with people in an authentic way that causes them to take note, and perhaps tell their friends. These connections will add up to you being top of mind when it comes time to buy a shed.

Message and Medium

No matter what size business you are, if you intend to grow next year by acquiring new customers, you can benefit from taking some time out of your busy fall to begin to hone your story, and plan for where and how you will tell it in 2017.

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