Ever sit on a one-legged stool?

It’s actually possible. But it sure doesn’t support you the way a stool with three legs does.

Look at much of the media and marketing messaging around ‘sustainability’, and you might think polar bears are its primary beneficiaries.

Look solely at some business sustainability indexes, and you might not realize environment was even included in the definition of sustainability.

But like that much-more-stable stool, sustainability has three pillars (or 4, or more, depending on which definition you favor), and failing to market each of those pillars can blunt your reach. At a minimum, sustainable systems, products, or practices should provide benefit not just environmentally but also economically and socially.

 

Let’s look at 5 simple changes that help existing and prospective customers see the value of your product or service for their specific needs – even if ‘going green’ isn’t their priority.

You can incorporate these tips into new marketing, or use them to tighten up existing content, to make sure you’re presenting a message that connects with your audience.

1. Know your audience

Make sure your marketing content speaks to the real needs, concerns, and goals of the audience you’re seeking to connect with – and remember that the prospective customer you’re seeking to engage may have different needs, concerns, or goals than your core of existing customers.

• Where do your customers look for content to help them make decisions? Rural Kenyan farming collectives, WholeFoods, and the city of Omaha all invest in renewable energy production, but their networks and media preferences? Definitely not a complete overlap.
• How do they like that content to be packaged – Product brief? Podcast? White paper? Webinar? Video explainer? Case Study?
• What search terms are they using when they research products?
• What problems do they need to solve?
• What do they deeply value that your product or service provides?
• What is the most important thing a piece of content can tell them to win their trust?

2. Market to your prospects’ problem, not your offerings

Sound counter intuitive, in a marketing effort? It’s not. New prospects aren’t looking for your product or service, necessarily: They have many options, and an overwhelming amount of information coming at them, and their first priority is to stop having the problem they’ve currently got.

Right now, they don’t care how many industry awards you have, or even the molecular-level details of your product – they care that you can quickly, easily show them how to solve their problem.

And, ideally, how you’ve already solved that problem – successfully – before.

Make sure the customer or prospect is the most important character in your marketing story. Then you’ll have the chance to introduce them to all those awards, features, and detailed specs.  

3. Speak to what your prospect values

One size really doesn’t fit all.

A development coalition providing vaccination programming in remote villages and a server administrator in Washington, DC, both have good reason to invest in your zero-emissions cooling system.

But are their core values – and therefore the messages they’ll connect to emotionally – likely to be the identical? Probably not.

Closely related to remembering to market all of the pillars of sustainability is making sure your target your messaging to your market – messaging that resonates with their unique experiences, priorities, and culture.

4. Make consuming your message easy.

We’ve talked about considering the places and formats your target audience prefers seeking information. And about speaking to your specific prospect’s values when you highlight what your company can bring to the table.

There are a few more simple fixes that help make reading (or hearing, or watching) your content a more appealing experience – and therefore increase the time your prospect is willing to give you. For more detail, see my full post on this topic alone.

Make your content concise, simple and clear.

That means plain, every day words wherever you can use them, a conversational tone that tells the reader you’re here to help, and editing until every word in your document has earned the right to be there.

Use the language your prospects use and are familiar with.

That language is going to be different for your new prospect’s program manager than it is for your engineering department; and it’s the prospect whom your message needs to resonate for.

Ditch most of the technical terms, jargon, and any large flocks of acronyms.

Sure, you’ll need to use one of these connection-killers from time to time, but be relentless in cutting them from your customer-facing content. And any technical term, abbreviation, or acronym that you MUST include? Define it the first time you use it.

Use stories and human examples.

Human beings are programmed to respond to story.

Using stories in your content not only captures readers’ attention in a way that few other things can, but it also increases their likelihood of remembering your message – for a remarkably long time, and increases their engagement.

Connection is always the goal

Content has to create an emotional connection with your audience. Even if your product is highly technical, long lists of facts and figures usually aren’t the path to connecting with your buyer.

Yes, those facts and figures will influence buying decisions, but not until you capture your prospect’s valuable time and attention.

5. And remember the whole picture of sustainability

And, as mentioned at the start, part of speaking to your customers’ problem, and connecting to their values, is knowing which pillar meets a prospects’ current pressing needs.

Perhaps you’ve marketed the additional savings in your standard marketing content, but can you focus an entire segment of your marketing on prospects looking for cost savings over time?

Or the way that all the pillars of sustainability meet in your product to reduce risk or increase opportunity for a vulnerable social group?

 

What other tips have you used to make your marketing content more effective?

 

Have questions? Want to discuss a project? Need more information?

You can reach me at Mary@MaryMorrisConsulting.com or via the links below!