MARKETING STRATEGIES: Getting the message right

You can’t blame the customer if they end up with a solution which is not as good as yours or decide to buy a competitor product when yours has equal benefits.

Basically, it is the vendor’s responsibility to put themselves in front of the customer and do so in a way which makes it easy for the customer to select them as the preferred solution.

Too often the vendor focuses on features and functions and forgets that this is not what the customer is thinking of when they have a problem.

Customers think in terms of problems, sometimes only in symptoms or attributes of the problem, not knowing what the real problem is. They think about solutions, not brands or products. It is the task of the vendor to meet customers where they are and not to expect the customer to work through a maze of information to find the vendor.

Getting the message right is more than telling the market about your product and how great it is, which is what many vendors do through their website and their marketing collateral.

They need to talk in terms of problems and solutions, using the words of the customer. If the customer can’t find you, you cannot be the vendor of choice.

If you think about the communication problem with potential customers, if we send out the wrong message, there is no reason to assume they will ever want to buy from us. We also have to put the right message in the right places in order to engage with our future customer.

Our first task is to get in front of them. If we don’t enter the conversation, we don’t get to play in the decision-making process. Therefore, the customer with the identified need has to find us in their information search.

Alternatively, if we want to trigger the need, they somehow need to recognise that we have the potential solution when we come into their space. Having the right message is fundamental to the sales process.

Tom McKaskill is a successful global serial entrepreneur, educator and author who is a world acknowledged authority on exit strategies and the former Richard Pratt Professor of Entrepreneurship, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. A series of free eBooks for entrepreneurs and angel and VC investors can be found at his site here.