Marketing Comm That Hits the Mark

One of the potential problems with the new world of marketing communications is that everyone can use online and offline channels to broadcast countless product stories ad infinitum to millions of people who may or may not be listening. You can help your prospects and customers remember the important parts of your brand story, and therefore improve your brand value, by sharpening your focus.

I can’t remember who to credit for this analogy, but I can’t claim it as my own. Nonetheless, it’s apt. If you throw a handful of ping-pong balls at someone, he won’t catch any of them. But if you throw only one, chances are good that he’ll be able to grab it. The same holds for product stories.

While I have used up a lot of electrons blogging about how today’s consumer requires layers and layers of information, and that we all need to start behaving less like marketers and more like journalists, it’s important not to throw all your stories at the consumer at once. Better to throw one story at a time, and to plan which ones get thrown first. You also need to throw the most important ping-pong balls more than once, just to make sure they get caught.

Rank order your stories, and clump them into themes.

If you can determine three or four broad themes, you can use these as touchstones, and build all your marketing materials from there. The home page of your website can be designed to highlight these three key themes, with a button to click that takes you to all the places on the website where these themes are elaborated. It works offline too.

Let’s say one of the primary themes for a real estate development is location. Perhaps the building site is bordered on one side by a park, and on the other sides by emerging, appealing neighbourhoods. Location is a bigger story, in this hypothetical situation, because it’s not just about a desirable street address, but all the goodness adjacent to the plot of land.

On your home page, you could have a “location story” button that leads deeper into the site where visitors can read about the park, see maps of the amenities available in the adjacent neighbourhoods, look at demographic statistics for each community, and even meet some of the local merchants through the magic of video.

Avoid overwhelming

An approach like this takes what could have been six or ten stories, all of which are important, and groups them under the theme of location. You’ve turned ten ping-pong balls into one. The attribute of “location” has been glued to your brand, and the potential risk of overwhelming your audience with too much information at once has been eliminated.

Take the same approach with print materials and with the way information is presented in your retail location, and the way stories are filed and tagged in your social media programs.

Your three main themes might become the three first sections of your brochure, or three story stations in your store. Perhaps photos on your Flickr site are filed in three different folders. If you are still using direct mail,  you could consider three mailings, spaced a week or more apart, each focused on one key theme. Three radio commercials. A series of three print ads. And so on. Before you know it, you have three very broad story themes inextricably linked to your brand, and you’ve made it easy for prospects and customers to know what to think about you.

This is a very simple technique to make sure the stories you want to tell about your company are easy to find, easy to consume, and easy to remember.