Golden Rules For Making Your Marketing Messages Stick

We all know what it’s like to get an ear worm. It’s those tunes that get stuck in your head for the entire day once you heard them on the radio. For consumers, this can be annoying. For marketers, it’s the holy grail. Making a jingle or a slogan that gets stuck in people’s heads is what it’s all about.

So how should startups go about emulating this and making their messages as sticky as possible? How can they best spend their marketing dollars on creating great brand positioning? Let’s find out.

Create A Eureka Moment

Our brains work a little bit like information sieves. They filter out all the junk information we receive through our senses every day. And they retain all the information that is useful. The problem for marketers is to make sure that people’s brains don’t filter out their information. So what should they do?

The best thing to do is to show people how your product is different. Take Apple’s first advertising campaign way back in the 1980s. Apple wanted to target a rebellious, youthful audience. And so it positioned the company as being David from the Bible story, up against Goliath, played by IBM. Consumers loved the fact that buying Apple was a rebellious decision. There was a eureka moment for people who were nonconformist in their views.

Do Stuff That Evokes Emotions

Human beings are emotional creatures, despite our protestations otherwise. We make most of our decisions based on how we feel, rather than how we think. If you don’t believe me, think back to all those times you’ve felt upset and walked to the freezer to grab the ice cream.

The best marketing messages are those that have the ability to tug at our heartstrings. Some commercials on the TV try to make us laugh. We’re suddenly confronted with the zany or the unexpected and that sticks in our minds. Other times, adverts try to make us cry. Think of the fuss over in Britain when department store John Lewis released its Christmas adverts a few years back. The entire nation was in some type of department store-induced hysteria.

If your message can tug at the emotions of other people, it’s far more likely to be remembered. Make sure that you position your call to action alongside your attempt to elicit emotion. It should be easy for customers to get in contact with you.

Pursue Personal Recommendations

All of the most successful companies in the world started off small. What was it that allowed them to grow into the massive empires that we see today? Some of it is down to venture capital funding. But a lot of it is simple recommendations.

Recommendations are the elixir that help to bring your marketing message to life. It’s one thing to say that you’ve got the best services in the industry. It’s quite another to have all of your customers talking about the fact that you have.

The question for marketers, therefore, is what can they do to get more word-of-mouth recommendations? The process is rather simple. It’s the usual trio of things businesses need: excellent service, great product and fair prices. The combination of these three will get people talking about your brand. In turn, your brand will become something that is self-sustaining. You won’t have to keep going out and beating your drum about how great your business is. Your customers will do that for you.

There’re other things that you can do too that help to meet the needs of your clients. One is to have a great website, teeming with useful resources. Another is to host a referral campaign. These are always crowd pleasers hand help to generate additional loyalty in your customer community. The third thing you can do is demonstrate your expertise through regular publications. Show the people in your industry that you’re an expert in your particular field. You’ll be surprised just how quickly this filters down to your network of customers and interested parties.

Create Deals People Can’t Forget

If people feel that they’re getting a good deal from you, they’ll pass on that information to their friends. There’s a strong focus in many people on what they need rather than what they want. So the task for people selling non-essential products is to convince people that they are still worth it. Companies need to focus on the cost-saving aspects of their products. They need to blend into the overall narrative right now that people can’t afford to spend all that much money.