I recently skimmed through "The Ultimate Marketing Plan" by Dan S. Kennedy and "Full Frontal PR" by Richard Laermer. This got me thinking about what makes a good marketing message and how to best get that message heard. 

Creating Your Messages: Your marketing plan needs to start with crafting the right message for your product. That message should be:

  1. Easy to promote, understand, and remember
  2. Honestly represents your product 
  3. Differentiates your product from the competition 
  4. Communicates its primary benefit 
  5. Exciting enough to encourage the customer to act now 
  6. Targeted to a segment of customers (geography, demographic, or affiliation) 
  7. Emphasized with pictures and testimonials 
  8. Reinforce your company's image, or a larger brand image

Getting Your Message Out: To get this message heard, you need to be consistent with the message in your advertising, during presentations at events, with the materials in a press kits, and whenever promoting or generating buzz about your product.

When working with people in the press, keep the following in mind:

  1. Be respectful of the people in the press, since they are under deadlines too
  2. Follow up with information when you said you would
  3. Never be dishonest about your product
  4. Be passionate about your product
  5. Be creative about explaining your product by using one or more of these methods:
    1. Use a local angle to tie into an interest that is common to a press person's audience
    2. Relate your product to a national story or trend
    3. Be controversial or shocking (not too much though)
    4. Be the expert that can be called upon to talk about your product 
    5. Invite the press to be part of beta testing new products
    6. Invite the press to product launch events. Keep this in mind though: "Count on the fact that only about five percent of those you invite will show up. If you want 40 people, send
      out 800 press invitations. Collect RSVPs and send out reminder notes, make follow
      up calls and last minute “we know you’re coming” calls."
    7. Share your "discovery" based on analyzing data on something about the marketplace, and of course position your product as being the best to address this discovery.