There are a number of ways to render the marketing triangle powerless, but there’s only one way to get it right: Right Message, Right Market, Right Media. Markets When you choose and use media, it’s vital to know who you’re trying to reach, attract, interest and persuade, and how they prefer to be offered and receive information and offers. Sadly, most businesspeople cannot accurately and completely describe exactly who they want to respond, who their ideal customer is or who their current customer is; for the most part, they’re playing blind archery. I was doing a lot of work with a particular chiropractor, and we meticulously analyzed his records and surveyed his patients, to discover the majority of his fee-for-service cash patients had two things in common: One, they paid using their American Express cards, rather than Visa or MasterCard, and two, they subscribed to Prevention magazine. A good way to think about information you may create and offer is as bait, and a key principle is “Match bait to critter.” In marketing, “bait” means two things: your message and whatever “thing” you offer to spark direct response, whether that’s literature and information, a free service, or a gift of one kind or another. Most businesspeople get poor results to their advertising and marketing because they either put out no bait, lousy bait or the wrong bait for the critters they hope to attract. Then, there’s a bigger issue regarding bait: Most business marketing is generic, one size fits all. First, it varies a lot by business. The one sure thing is this: If the media can’t be used to deliver a direct response message, skip it. Only what your target customer audience actually prefers and engages with matters.
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The following excerpt is from Dan S. Kennedy’s book No B.S. Direct Marketing. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
There are basically three components to marketing: a message, a media to deliver it, and a market to receive and respond to it. None can function without the others — each feeds the others.
There are a number of ways to render the marketing triangle powerless, but there’s only one way to get it right: Right Message, Right Market, Right Media.
Now let’s look at getting all three parts functioning effectively and in sync with the others.
Markets
When you choose and use media, it’s vital to know who you’re trying to reach, attract, interest and persuade, and how they prefer to be offered and receive information and offers. When you craft your message, you need to know who it’s for (and who it isn’t). The who you want as a customer gets to govern everything.
Yet most marketing remains product-centric, not customer-centric, and most marketing is very broad, vague, and generic, not narrow, focused and specific. Sadly, most businesspeople cannot accurately and completely describe exactly who they want to respond, who their ideal customer is or who their current customer is; for the most part, they’re playing blind archery.
I have dealt with many, many examples of this over the years. Let me tell you about one example that’s instructive.
I was doing a lot of work with a particular chiropractor, and we meticulously analyzed his records and surveyed his patients, to discover the majority of his fee-for-service cash patients had two things in common: One, they paid using their American Express cards, rather than Visa or MasterCard, and two, they subscribed to Prevention magazine. The majority.
In the commercial mailing list marketplace, you can rent the list of Prevention magazine subscribers by zip code (as well as by gender, age, etc.), and you can rent the list of American Express cardholders by zip code. My client took only the duplicates, the people in his market area on both lists. Because he had to rent 5,000 names from each list as a required minimum, it cost him…
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