What If Your Marketing Is Strong, But Your Message Barely Breaks Through?
Makreting is an odd and fickle beast, in that you can invest millions into it but there’s no guarantee it will pay off. Moreover, sometimes the “return” is something you can’t exactly quantify in specific terms, like brand familiarity.
A company like Coca-Cola might invest millions into just having their logo at the side of a football stadium advertising banner, not because they expect you’ll see it and rush to buy a product of theirs, but because it helps them retain relevance in your mind and memory.
That could, and possibly will, pay off at a later date. It could be why you ask for a “Coke” instead of a “Pepsi” when out for dinner with friends.
However, marketing can be strong, but even the more vague payoff still might not come. In such circumstances, it’s important to think about what could be going wrong and how your approach could have influenced it. In rare cases, it was just bad luck, but as any marketing team worth its salt will aim to be proactive, that answer isn’t good enough.
In this post, I'll discuss what to think about if your message simply isn’t breaking through.
Table of Contents
Is The Message Too Complicated?
Simplicity isn’t necessarily the same as dumbing something down, because if anyone needs to read your ad three times to understand what you're offering, they've already moved on to something else. We see this all the time with brands that try to sound clever or sophisticated but end up confusing their audience because they’re not outlining what they offer or what a product is.
Think of how Xbox recently tried to promote the “everything is an Xbox!” initiative to sell their cloud service that could be played on a browser. It confused people. Make sure the marketing message you’re putting out there isn’t cutting into what you’re trying to achieve. Ultimately, people remember things that are clear and easy to repeat to someone else.
You're Talking To The Wrong People
Ultimately, you have to try to keep putting your campaign in front of people who care about what you're selling. Targeting matters more than most businesses realize, as you could have the best campaign in the world, but if it's reaching an audience that has no need for your product, it's just noise. Even people who invest in more broad options, like billboards, don’t expect everyone to make use of it, they hope that a certain percentage of passers-by care.
Always invest in where your ideal customers are spending their time and what they're paying attention to. A branding agency can help you figure out who you should be talking to and how to reach them where they already are. The following is also relevant:
Your Visuals Aren't Helping Your Impact
We all process images faster than words, so if your visuals are boring or don't match your message, you're effectively adding on “brain processing time” for someone to get the message. Colors, fonts, and layout should all say something before anyone reads a single word.
If your design feels outdated or too much like your competition, it tells people your brand might be too. Some businesses even rebrand if various marketing approaches haven’t worked, so they can be a little more punchy.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily avoid poor marketing and a struggle getting any message across.
For more tips and tricks, check out these articles:
