How To Get the Attention Of Your Target Market

When it comes to creating a controllable and pre- dictable flow of new clients, having a great prod-

uct is not enough. Sure, a great product and great service will help with word of mouth (WOM) marketing. Howev- er, WOM is neither controllable nor predictable.

And whilst receiving new business from unsolicited re- ferrals is like an unexpectedly delightful cream on the cake, it’s also random and unpredictable, and those are not char- acteristics on which a business can sustain significant growth.

To create controllable and predictable growth you MUST systemize your marketing efforts.

That means getting your message out through multiple mediums, the nature of which will vary depending on a whole range of factors including the type of product/service you offer, your regional focus, your Ideal Client Profile, your budget and so on.

However, having got your message out systematically through multiple mediums you may still not succeed in ei-

ther seizing the attention of your target market or convert- ing them into paying clients.

The reason is simple and the mistake is littered across every marketing medium imaginable – television, radio, newspaper, magazines, Yellow Pages, brochures, billboards, email campaigns websites and to a lesser extent direct mail.

The mistake is this: a failure to create a message that cuts through the cluttered bombardment of marketing messages that your Ideal Client is subjected to - an exponentially high- er number of marketing messages every year.

With that sort of machine gunning of messages it’s no wonder that our clients and prospects aren’t noticing, let alone reading, your marketing messages.

Recently I held an online event called “Ten ‘Million Dollar’ Marketing Secrets”.

In it I talked about the “Bold Promise” and I believe that this concept holds the key to grabbing your prospect’s atten- tion and eliciting an enquiry from them. What happens after that is over to the quality of your sales processes, products and service.

But for an estimated 90% plus of business owners the hardest part of gaining new clients is simply getting the val- ue proposition in front of them so the business can “strut its stuff”.

Is that true of you? Do you get the deal and make the sale perhaps 50 – 70% of the time that you present your value

proposition to a client? Perhaps it’s only 25 – 50% of the time but nevertheless it still adds up to this: somehow you need to figure out how to get your Ideal Clients’ attention in the face of what is now both an online and offline storm of market- ing messages.

My idea about the power of the Bold Promise is this: be- gin by examining what it is your Ideal Clients really, truly, deeply want and/or what they really truly, deeply want to avoid.

In the context of your Ideal Client’s experience of your industry, ask yourself these questions:

• What really annoys them?

• What deeply frustrates them?

• What do they truly hate having to do?

• What do they hate having to experience?

• If they had a magic wand, what would they wish for?

• And the most powerful one of them all: what emotion do they want to feel?

Once you have the answers to this question then you have the raw ingredients for creating your Bold Promise.

For example: Tom Monaghan bought a second hand pizza store in 1960 and in 1967 he launched the franchise into a market place that included over 200 other franchised home delivery pizza offerings. That’s massive competition not only to get pizza into the mouths of Ideal Clients who were spoiled for choice and were notorious price shoppers but also competition for new franchisees.

However they went from almost zero market share to the second largest home delivery pizza business in the world and their success is due in part, I believe, to the creation of their Bold Promise.

I can still vividly recall home delivery pizza before Dom- inos invaded our country. At the time my wife and I both worked full time and we had three to five kids at home (de- pending on foster kids and who was moving out or moving back) and so Sunday night was often pizza night.

So around five in the afternoon we’d start thinking about dinner and naturally the kids wanted some form of fast food. We didn’t live near any outlets and it was easy just to pick up the phone and get some pizza in.

So we’d take the orders from our excited kids and one of the older ones would feverishly place the phone order and then the wait began.

Typically we’d be told to expect the pizza in around 30 minutes so at around the 50 minute mark we’d call again and be told that the pizza was on its way which was almost always a lie and so with me getting scratchy and the kid’s blood sugar levels dropping and fights breaking out all over we’d call back another couple of times, start thumping the table and the pizza would arrive … flaccid and lukewarm; definitely not fresh or hot.

So if you read the above mentioned questions it’s not hard to figure out why Dominos were so extraordinarily success- ful with “Delivered hot and fresh in 30 minutes or you don’t pay”.

Did you notice how they guaranteed their Bold Promise? That makes it significantly more powerful and it’s an area where most business owners wimp out on.

So if creating a Bold Promise is such an effective strategy, how come everyone is not using it? Fair question, but per- haps the more important question is why aren’t YOU using it?

Well for starters you may have only just read about it ex- pressed in this way.

But now that you’re aware of it, there is still going to be a series of obstacles for you to overcome prior to creating, im- plementing and then profiting from your own Bold Prom- ise.

Here are several of the obstacles in rough order of the se- quence in which you will face them:

1. Obstacle #1: Taking the time out to complete the an- swers to the questions I’ve listed above and then com- ing back

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