My last blog post talked about building your marketing messages.  The purpose is to help you identify a framework for your offering so you know your position in the market and to help you create the building blocks for your brand.  Once you have those elements in place, it’s easier to develop “character” or “personality” for your brand.  Think of them as the core pillar messages.

Brand personality is the first step in creating your overall marketing message.  Nobody cares about your personality or your story if you don’t care about them.  So in order to get a chance to pitch your marketing messages you must understand your customers.

Marketing messages are about you, your company and your story. The opposite of that is called field messages. A field message is used when persuading customers to buy while marketing messages is to generate value proposition; and together they form your brand’s initiate market perception and impression.

Branding is how your customers engage with your brand and is only meaningful when you’re able to streamline your marketing messages to your field messages connecting your product to your customers optimizing the experience.  It matters more as you grow and to grow you must gain customer’s trust via communication and demonstration.

You need the right go-to-market strategies, a team that can execute and support the entire process. And of course it helps if you have a real product that’s attractive and competitive. Ask yourself this:  What are you doing to influence, persuade, acquire and support your prospect?  How do you change your audience’s mindset, even when they aren’t looking to buy?  Where do you go to find your customers?  How does your customer feel about the experience of your product and services?

Customer Engagement – The Right Field Messages

Marketers today are too focused on creating awareness and recognition and forget the true purpose of marketing – create sales dialogues, attract leads and deliver revenue.  Again it all goes back to “what’s in it for me?”

New customers are out there. They need your products and services. They are searching for you, but you have to efficiently communicate your value to them in the simplest matter. When a representative of your company, a salesperson or yourself is out in front of the prospective clients, you need to have your field message straight.

Make sure you cover the 3 major points below:

1. Does the message communicate that you understand your prospect’s needs?  And their pain points? Your product could be the best thing since sliced bread, but if you’re not solving their problems or you don’t understand their business pain points, you possess no value to them.  And why should they continue to stay engage in conversation with you or your brand?
2. Is it the message focused enough on your unique offering? What are they buying, what do they get and what’s included should be covered at some point.  If you are not unique and different, what’s the advantages of you, or doing business with your company?  People go to Costco because not only do they offer value-for-money products but an unbeatable return policy, with awesome $1.50 hot dogs with free unlimited refill drinks – more reasons to go.
3. Did you do your homework in researching your competitors? Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – wouldn’t you shop around for the best deal when buying a new car or purchasing a new cell phone?  Not to mention all the review articles and blogs you can find online.  So make sure you have the facts to backup your marketing statements, and be ready to explain in detail about your competition and their offerings.

If you’re able to address all the points above with your field messages, chances are that you will get to pitch your offering.  Getting someone’s attention in a meaningful way will also make you memorable and the crafting your field message is no different.  Get to the point fast and deliver the punch at the right time.

Here are a few more tips on starting your field messages: instead of starting your field message with “XYZ company is a SEO company that provides SEO services for onilne lead generation” you could start with “Businesses today face challenges of optimizing SEO campaigns from outsourcing companies, but often does not get the result they want.” There you address their problem and pain point of not able to get the desired outcome.  Another approach could be “what are you doing to optimize your SEO leads? How effective is your ROI on SEO?”  An open ended question is often something that works well to get readers thinking, it works well if you know who you’re talking to first.  And it goes back to my last blog entry about identifying your audience first.

There is no doubt that it’s important to showcase how great you are, but it’s even more vital to “communicate well” why your customer needs to continue listening to your pitch or read your materials.

The Web has fundamentally altered the way that people engage and interact with brands, products, companies, and other people. This leads to a shorter attention span from viewers across all media, there are simply too much information to absorb from news on TV, radio ads, online blogs, and social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. With prospects, with customers and between prospects and customers, engagement is more complex, but substantially more powerful because of how we interact via the web today and the constant shift in consumer psychology.

I will be providing free brand message worksheets for blog subscribers soon on field and brand message, stay tuned.