by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]
You may be thinking on cutting back on your marketing efforts - think again now is not the time to pull back on your marketing! During economic turbulence, customers need reassurance and are most concerned about meeting their needs while minimising risks. Therefore, marketing messages should be aligned with safety and risk avoidance. Here are ten marketing tips to attract more customers in these difficult times:
- Use a Powerful Headline – The headline is your opportunity to attract your reader’s attention by offering an attention-grabbing headline. You can ask a question to challenge the reader, provoke a response, or provide valuable information that is appealing to the reader.
- Focus on your Target Customers – Understand who you are targeting and talk directly to them. You must prepare a customer profile to help you identify with your customers.
- Make an Offer – Create a relevant offer aimed at your potential customers. The offer must be something that your customers are looking for and not what you think they should want.
- Sell the Benefits not Features – Use benefits to paint the picture of the results that your customer desires. In this time of economic challenge frame your benefit around safety and risk avoidance whenever possible.
- Sense of Urgency – Build a sense of urgency by limiting the offer to a time period or if in retail to the availability of stock.
- Call to Action – Provide a ‘call to action’ to tell your potential customers what they have to do for them to take up your offer. Make it very clear and do not assume they will know what to do.
- Prepare your List – If you are planning a mail-out, consider: What is your relationship with the target list? How updated and clean is your list? When was the last time you contacted them? Your answers will give you an indication of the receptiveness of your target list to your message. Think of the level of trust that may exist.
- Creative – Your marketing message will be competing with so many others and your creative must work hard to make it standout. How will your creative appeal to curiosity?
- Test – Haste makes waste! Before you run the entire campaign test variations of your marketing components to see what will work best. Fine-tune and run with the best performing one.
- Track & Measure – Track and record the results of your marketing effort. Recording and measuring results will allow you to determine what marketing campaign works best for your target customers. Once it becomes clear to you what works best you will know where to put your marketing dollars and time.
