The powerful marketing technique you’ve already nailed and should use in your business.

Let me illustrate how a skill that you already have has the potential to transform your business once you put it to work.

You’re arranging a family excursion to mark an event. You’re bringing three generations together, and after careful research you’ve found a venue with something of interest to everyone in your party. You need everyone’s buy-in, but your mum’s not keen on the venue and has made a counter-suggestion that’s not ideal; your teenagers are moaning about having to go at all.

To get your mum on board, since you know she likes walking you’ll emphasise the opportunity for a nature walk, and to really convince her you’ll mention the gin afternoon tea that she can’t resist! You’ll also appeal to what you know will be her desire to accommodate others in the party when you point out that her counter-suggestion won’t work for the kids.

To sell the idea to your teenagers, you’ll use a totally different approach. They won’t care about the afternoon tea, so you’re going to big up the fast internet and how there will be time for them to chill and charge their Nintendo Switch. You know that once there they’ll do the walks with grandma too anyway and thoroughly enjoy it. And, vitally, you catch them when they emerge from their bedroom, because you know it’s pointless trying to persuade them of anything if you drag them out half asleep.

This is best practice marketing and you do it instinctively in your personal life: in short, you focus on different benefits, use a different tone, and engage in conversation where your target is most receptive to it. You thoroughly know your different audiences, their preferences and behaviours, and you adapt your message in order to successfully get their buy-in.

If you’re not doing this in your business, you’re wasting a lot of time and missing out on a lot of potential customers.

Which is why, when I take on a copy project, I won’t write a single word until I’ve established what is your Unique Selling Proposition (to continue the analogy, why is the venue you’ve picked the only one that will work for everyone?) and what are your Customer Personas i.e. who are your target customers, where are they, what do they like doing, what are they doing right now? How is Covid-19 affecting them? What tone of voice will best carry your message?

Simple logic. And pretty involved too. After defining the essential background information, you need to pick the words that will most effectively encapsulate everything relevant for the particular goal you have in, say, a 90 character Google ad; an email; a couple of sentences on a social media post before it’s trimmed in-feed; and so on.

I hope I’ve illustrated how you already have a skill that can transform your marketing, and when you’re working with a copywriter or any other marketing creative, you’ll know why they bang on about USPs and Customer Personas! Make a start on writing yours for your business now and let me know how you get on!

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