The power of a first impression is priceless. Within a few seconds, your customer has already had a positive or negative interaction with your brand through your marketing materials; a website, brochure, direct mailer, packaging, or point-of-purchase display to name a few.
How effective will your materials be in engaging them and positioning your brand as the one they should choose? When is the last time you took a hard, objective look at your materials to see how they are performing? Have you made product or service enhancements and only updated certain materials without getting around to updating the rest of them?
Time for Some Maintenance?
Your marketing material is just like a car. It may appear to be running ok and doing what it’s supposed to do, but upon careful inspection, you may uncover things that could be hampering your performance (in generating more sales and leads).
In the case of our car analogy, perhaps an oil change, putting more air in the tires, changing a spark-plug or starter will help it run better or increase gas mileage. The key to maintenance is doing an assessment of which factors could be impacting your performance and making adjustments accordingly. Here are some common factors to start with.
Inconsistent Messaging
Using a lot of different messages in your marketing creates confusion with your customer and can damage their brand perception. Think about it this way; what if your customer was on the ice as a hockey player listening to the crowd cheer in the stands, but everyone was shouting something different. Chances are your customer wouldn’t get any motivation from these fans because there is no single message or clear picture of what the crowd is trying to say.
Now, imagine how different the result would be if everyone in the crowd was cheering, ‘Go Team Go!”
Part of building a solid brand identity is to be consistent in the message you are communicating. For example, if your unique selling benefit is durability, then durability should be the core message you consistently focus on communicating through your marketing material (with the help of secondary feature points to support it - ie. protective coating, solid workmanship, material finishing).
A tune-up approach would be to modify your messaging so it’s the same throughout your advertising. That way, every time your customer is exposed to it, it tells them the same thing and reinforces the same idea so they remember it.