Connect The Dots In Your Marketing
07.14.2005 | Chris BaileyWendy at Kinetic Ideas offers a simple, yet powerful suggestion for developing marketing resources: make your marketing solve a problem. Simple, right? Then why do most association brochures present a general litany of here’s who we are, here’s our benefits, here’s what we’re doing, blah, blah. Even most association websites are self-centered vehicles for announcing blah stuff about the organization. In short, it’s all about the association and hardly ever about the person actually holding the brochure or reading the ad or browsing the site.
Point #1 that Wendy makes is that:
People (you and me included) want to know what is in it for them. They are interested in useful ideas, services, and products that make something better in their life. Don’t talk about YOU. Start talking about THEM.
Some sagely advice I received a while back is that an association feature can’t be called a benefit until it you show the member how it benefits them. So, just don’t tell a prospective custo/member that you have a nice, award-winning publication. Connect the dots and help them understand how they can use it to solve a problem they’re facing in their work or life.
2 Responses to “Connect The Dots In Your Marketing”
Leave a Reply
Chris,
Thank you for including this excerpt from my blog entry. I find it’s a hard task for all of us to de-emphasize what our company does and what we know. It seems so relevant. And yet, it doesn’t do anything to set our business apart.
I have an earlier entry that I think compliments your post quite nicely: “What’s the Difference Between Features and Benefits?” at http://wendy.kinesisinc.com/?p=23
Best, Wendy Maynard
Chris,
You hit on something that’s an age-old struggle for all of us. How many times have we sat in meetings wondering, “What do we really sell anyway?” We usually (me included) can respond to that question, when it’s offered by someone else, with a litany of benefits but it’s truly a scattershot approach — you sort of hope that you happen to hit on somebody’s hot button. What we “do” needs to be centered down into a specific message that solves a problem for the member — is the problem, “I need to make more money?” “I need more time with my family?” “I need intelligence to get ahead of my competition (or move ahead in a professional career)?” “I need to know how to do this ’stuff’?” Whatever it is. (And sometimes you need to be able to learn how to solve problems that members didn’t know they had.)
Associations don’t have a product, we have a market. That’s kind of cool — it can allow for great flexibility and creativity if you embrace it — but it can also be problematic. Many associations wind up offering “benefits” that have nothing to do with each other besides the fact that they provide a service or good of value to different segments/individuals within a membership.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing — it just requires a lot of creativity on the part of staff to figure out how to structure marketing and retention. And it’s definitely going to require much greater proficiency in technology. In the “good old days” you could afford (maybe) to depend on your market to “find” the things you offer that are of specific interest to an individual. These days, there are too many marketing messages in too many media — we need to get really good at targeting our messages (and crafting them), really fast.