Field Messages: Sell The Outcome

by Eric Tsai

My last blog post talked about building your marketing messages.  The purpose is to help you identify a framework for your offering so you know your position in the market and to help you create the building blocks for your brand.  Once you have those elements in place, it’s easier to develop “character” or “personality” for your brand.  Think of them as the core pillar messages.

Brand personality is the first step in creating your overall marketing message.  Nobody cares about your personality or your story if you don’t care about them.  So in order to get a chance to pitch your marketing messages you must understand your customers.

Marketing messages are about you, your company and your story. The opposite of that is called field messages. A field message is used when persuading customers to buy while marketing messages is to generate value proposition; and together they form your brand’s initiate market perception and impression.

Branding is how your customers engage with your brand and is only meaningful when you’re able to streamline your marketing messages to your field messages connecting your product to your customers optimizing the experience.  It matters more as you grow and to grow you must gain customer’s trust via communication and demonstration.

You need the right go-to-market strategies, a team that can execute and support the entire process. And of course it helps if you have a real product that’s attractive and competitive. Ask yourself this:  What are you doing to influence, persuade, acquire and support your prospect?  How do you change your audience’s mindset, even when they aren’t looking to buy?  Where do you go to find your customers?  How does your customer feel about the experience of your product and services?


Customer Engagement – The Right Field Messages

Marketers today are too focused on creating awareness and recognition and forget the true purpose of marketing – create sales dialogues, attract leads and deliver revenue.  Again it all goes back to “what’s in it for me?”

New customers are out there. They need your products and services. They are searching for you, but you have to efficiently communicate your value to them in the simplest matter. When a representative of your company, a salesperson or yourself is out in front of the prospective clients, you need to have your field message straight.

Make sure you cover the 3 major points below:

  1. Does the message communicate that you understand your prospect’s needs?  And their pain points? Your product could be the best thing since sliced bread, but if you’re not solving their problems or you don’t understand their business pain points, you possess no value to them.  And why should they continue to stay engage in conversation with you or your brand?
  2. Is it the message focused enough on your unique offering? What are they buying, what do they get and what’s included should be covered at some point.  If you are not unique and different, what’s the advantages of you, or doing business with your company?  People go to Costco because not only do they offer value-for-money products but an unbeatable return policy, with awesome $1.50 hot dogs with free unlimited refill drinks – more reasons to go.
  3. Did you do your homework in researching your competitors? Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – wouldn’t you shop around for the best deal when buying a new car or purchasing a new cell phone?  Not to mention all the review articles and blogs you can find online.  So make sure you have the facts to backup your marketing statements, and be ready to explain in detail about your competition and their offerings.

If you’re able to address all the points above with your field messages, chances are that you will get to pitch your offering.  Getting someone’s attention in a meaningful way will also make you memorable and the crafting your field message is no different.  Get to the point fast and deliver the punch at the right time.

Here are a few more tips on starting your field messages: instead of starting your field message with “XYZ company is a SEO company that provides SEO services for onilne lead generation” you could start with Businesses today face challenges of optimizing SEO campaigns from outsourcing companies, but often does not get the result they want.” There you address their problem and pain point of not able to get the desired outcome.  Another approach could be “what are you doing to optimize your SEO leads? How effective is your ROI on SEO?”  An open ended question is often something that works well to get readers thinking, it works well if you know who you’re talking to first.  And it goes back to my last blog entry about identifying your audience first.

There is no doubt that it’s important to showcase how great you are, but it’s even more vital to “communicate well” why your customer needs to continue listening to your pitch or read your materials.

The Web has fundamentally altered the way that people engage and interact with brands, products, companies, and other people. This leads to a shorter attention span from viewers across all media, there are simply too much information to absorb from news on TV, radio ads, online blogs, and social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. With prospects, with customers and between prospects and customers, engagement is more complex, but substantially more powerful because of how we interact via the web today and the constant shift in consumer psychology.

I will be providing free brand message worksheets for blog subscribers soon on field and brand message, stay tuned.

Good Design: Part 3 – Marketing & Positioning

by Eric Tsai

The last element of good design is to maximize the design by selling it – distribute it in the market, execute on marketing.

Picture this: you have a product idea and spent a great deal of time laying down the solid design framework for this innovative product,  you think it’ll be a huge hit.  And finally you developed a production sample and it’s even better than you had imagined!  How would you translate that into success? Can you build a path to optimize the user experience?  Do you have the roadmap to revenue?


Integrate Ideas into Strategies

Great marketing doesn’t make the product great, but a great product usually have marketing built into it already.  It’s not about feature or benefits. This is a highly overlooked area for many creators and designers today, not having a playbook of strategies from start to finish.  The best way to start developing your game plan is to imagine your ideal situation, your desired outcome then work backwards into the design.


For example, you came up with a new type of shoes that can help runners run longer and faster, then you should start your design framework by addressing the needs of your targeted runners.  Perhaps those shoes solve some technical problems or have certain style advantages, they should all be part of the initial research so the end product could easily sell itself.

Think of how your want your users to view your product, better yet what reaction would you want them to have?  Who, where, why and how are just as important questions to ask.

  • Who is it for?
  • Where would they use it?
  • Why would they use it? Want it or need it?
  • How does it work?  How do they experience the product before committing to it?

The more specific market segment(s) you target, the more value you will bring to those customers.   If you can formulate those outcomes and keep them in mind before you start and address them during your process you will most likely have an easier time marketing the product.


Positioning and Messaging

Communication design is about translating the concept and selling the idea.  This is also one of the more difficult task for majority of the designers especially those focusing on aesthetics.  This aspect of design requires a lot more creative juices on the business side and it does not have to be pretty, it just has to be simple, concise and to the point.

There are many approaches in developing the right messaging however; many well crafted messages can sound professional but mundane. It could be nicely written and formatted by some marketing agency with all kinds of overrated phrases like “innovative, unmatched, or amazing,” but it won’t receive the attention it deserves.  In fact, the more you overpraise, the less unique you are.  Ironically what works are the cheesy, low-cost, infomercial marketing pitch that does the trick.

fsimageresizeaspxThe low-end positioning may not add much brand equity to the product, but the message usually is loud and clear not to mention easy to remember.  The objective is simple, reveal the message and show what’s inside, what you are really selling, no tricks of gimmicks because they only work short-term.

High-end positioning is all about sustaining your brand equity over time and usually it takes a lot of resources to maintain the product or services at a high level.  Think of all the luxury brands from Rolex to Bentley, from Chanel to Armani, all had to endure time and competition.  You are paying for character, history, quality and image.

In the long run it’s about incorporating the framework and user experience of the design to the end-user.  Everyone wants to sell good design, you can make money with good design or you can look good doing it, it’s market perception.


Leverage Technology and Networking

In today’s market, the design arena has evolved into a highly competitive landscape forcing designers and creators to utilize every possible resource to maximize the exposure and sales of good design.  The digital world has transformed the way that brands communicate with their audiences. Interactivity and engagement are more important than ever. Marketers are using web2.0 tools such as blogs and Twitter and social network platforms such as Facebook, Youtube and Myspace to reach out to as many audience as possible.

There are plenty of resources on the internet that can educate you on the power of social networking, but it is still only a tool.  If you want to maxmize your next design idea, you must have a solid framework with go-to-market strategies that includes the right message ready to communicate to your customers.  This will allow you to have a higher probability of gaining brand recongition, and through recognition you control the destiny of your design or ideas.