Message, Market, Media ~ The only three things you need to know for a successful marketing campaign.

Market dominance is achieved by your message to your clients, identification of the market preferences, and targeted campaigns with laser focus media.

When you get right down to the basics of marketing, there are three components: a message, a media to deliver it, and a market to receive it and respond to it. No one component can function without the others, each feeds the others, and all are interdependent of one another.

We can easily find ways to render the marketing triangle powerless. The ONLY method to assure market attraction, lead generation, and raving fans for your community and services is Right Message, Right Market, Right Media.

Let us look at getting all three parts functioning effectively and coordinated with the others.

Markets

When we choose and use media, it is vital to understand who you are trying to reach, attract, interest, and persuade and how this group prefers to receive information and offers. We must craft our message by knowing who it is for and for whom it is not. Who you want as a client governs everything.

Most marketing in the senior housing (really all spaces) is product-centric, not client-centric. Admittedly most marketing is broad, vague, and generic when it needs focus and to be specific. Most businesspeople (myself included in my early career) cannot accurately describe and know who their ideal customer is. They do know who their current customer is, nor do they know what their customers are looking for. Most marketing campaigns are playing blind archery. Identify your target client or customer. Get out of the anybody and everybody place right away. Run from a PR campaign with no targeted audience.

Message

We are easily and quickly interested in information related to what interests us. We are drawn to information promising secrets, fascinating truths, solutions to problems, prevention of imminent threats, promises of seductive benefits, and of course “breaking news.” This is the breakthrough prescription for magnetic communication causing the attraction of people.

An effective way to think about information we create and offer to our prospects is as a lure to persuade. To lure targeted prospects, we must have a great message and whatever “thing” we are offering to spark a direct response. The thing can be literature, information, free service, a gift, or free access.

Most businesspeople get very slight results from their advertising and marketing because they neither offer no lure, an inferior quality lure, or the wrong lure for the market they hope to attract.

Presenting no offer or lure is the ordinary image of brand advertising versus direct response marketing. Lousy lure is boring, uninteresting, and unappealing offers. A free report on "How to Buy Senior Housing" is a lousy lure. A free report on "How to Make the Right Decision for Your Loved One and Avoid Spending a Lifetime of Savings "is a better lure.

There is a bigger issue regarding our lure. Most business advertising and marketing is generic, one size fits all. Most marketing in the senior space uses generic tools: one brochure, one trifold, one website, one packet for everybody. One size fit all. A magnetic message is just for me. As soon as I see it, I jump out of my skin because it is clearly for me, matches me, and my problem. It matches me and my pain, my fear, my passion, and my hopes.

Media

Our list of media choices is long, and the media keeps expanding at record levels. How do we decide what media will work, what media is essential?

Media varies by business. More importantly, the right media has to do with who you are trying to reach. Does the target audience pay attention to and respond to the media you are using? The most important thing to know is this: If the media we are using cannot deliver a direct response message, terminate its use immediately.

The media we prefer using, the ways we communicate and access information, and our ideas about what nobody does anymore or what everybody does now mean nothing. It matters NOT what we think about things. ONLY what our target customer audience prefers and engages with matters. Advertising is not about us; it is about the target audience.

Our mandate is to find ways to use many different forms of media as we can. Most business owners become dependent on only one or two means of obtaining clients, leaving them vulnerable to sudden business disruption and entry to more aggressive competition.

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