“I’m having difficulty with generating leads for my business. What advice can you give for developing a message for getting more leads?”
Early in my radio sales career I can recall purchasing a series of sales tapes from Tom Hopkins. If you’ve ever been in sales I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He was considered the sales guru of the time. I recall one of his tapes where he demonstrated through the use of a prop, a gun that would shoot flags saying “emotion.” That series was titled “Emotion, the Triggers of selling.”
In E-Myth Mastery’s Marketing Module after we’ve determined the who, and where, (demographics and geographic information) we ask why? Why do customers shop, or would they shop or use your service? We go through a series of tools that determine the dominant gratification and purchase preference mode, but at the core of what we are working on is discovering what emotion is your business really selling?
If you want help getting more leads this is the essential question to ask. What emotion are you selling? It might be fun, convenience, success or romance. When you see a good ad on TV or hear a good ad on the radio that’s what you immediately remember about it. It made you feel something. A scary movie should run an ad that makes you feel scared right? A funny movie should make you laugh. How many times have you seen a trailer for a comedy and it didn’t make you laugh. If you’re like me you determined right away you weren’t going, believing that they generally put the best material in their ads right?
How do you know what emotion you are selling? Most of us are too close to our business to know, so we ne, ed to ask our customers or we simply need to back away from our business and attain that level of objectivity that’s required to determine this. That’s why the very best marketers have the ability to separate themselves from their business and see it from the customer’s vantage point. Domino’s built their business on a 30 minute guarantee that unfortunately evaporated when lawsuits started arriving because of their delivery people hurrying to get to their appointments before time ran out. Despite the lawsuits I think they made a mistake by dropping that differentiation. Why was that so successful? Convenience. People were perfectly willing to pay less for a pizza that wasn’t quite as good if it could be there in 30 minutes. In many cases you could set your watch by it, And best of all if you were a poor college kid you’d hope they were late so you’d get it free or get $$ off.
Roy Williams, who runs the Wizard of Ads Academy in Austin Texas, believes that most ad campaigns fail not because they reach the wrong audience but because the message fails to reach the prospect effectively. How do you reach your prospect effectively? That’s right with an emotional message that says, “I want that.”
So what emotion are you selling? Can you determine that on your own? Do you need help? Ask your customers and set time aside to explore this on your own. If you need tools to help you discover your differentiation, contact us. But whatever you do make sure you lead generation messages deliver a message that has emotional impact.
