Six Questions To Successful Web Advertising (Part 1)
1. How will your product or service change your customer?
All stories or marketing messages have to do with change: a cosmetic company provides change from plain to beautiful, from self-doubt to self-confidence. A vitamin supplement supplier provides change from poor health to good health, from sluggish to vitality. A self-help motivational program provides change from defeat to victory, from depression to wellbeing, and so on.
All good marketing stories highlight the change that your audience wants to make in their business or personal lives. Go deeper than the obvious look for the psychological, emotional, cognitive or spiritual change your company delivers.
All successful campaigns are about change. People who are satisfied with their work and life aren’t motivated to be customers; you want to target people who are motivated, people who want to be better, stronger, smarter, prettier, healthier, and richer; people who want more out of work and more out of life.
If your audience isn’t motivated to change and if your product or service can’t deliver that change, then you’re wasting your time and your money.
2. Is what you have to say different?
If you are saying the same thing, the same way as your competition, you’re in trouble. You must differentiate yourself somehow; you must standout. Your product or service must provide something different. The world is full of ‘me-too’ companies, businesses that do the same thing as dozens of other businesses. You must find that unique something in what you offer that makes you different; that says you are not a follower but a leader.
If your product or service is substantially the same as your competitors, perhaps you should market it differently, or maybe you should concentrate on the ‘High Concept’ need it delivers, rather than the standard ’same-old-same-old’ that everyone else is touting.
Which one of ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ does your product or service fulfill: physical, safety, social, self-esteem, aesthetic, cognitive, or self-actualization? Chances are your competition has completely ignored the psychological and emotional marketing angle and is focusing on specifications and features that have little to do with why people really choose one product over another.
3. Do you know how to tell your story?
You must have more than a story to tell or a message to deliver; you must know how to tell it. Your marketing should create a recognizable corporate image that establishes a unique identity in the mind of your audience. If your audience sees no difference between you and the competition then you become interchangeable.
Apple didn’t capture the lion’s share of the MP3 market just because their product is arguable better than everyone else’s, they did because iPods are more than MP3 players, they are a life-style choice, clearly delineated in commercials and advertising.
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