 How do you inspire people to action through marketing and advertising? Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where you'll learn marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder here at Slam Agency. We are a boutique marketing agency designed to help you captivate, motivate and inspire people to action. And that is exactly what I want to share with you today. Now Simon Sinek says that there are two ways to influence human behavior. The first is through manipulation. Now manipulation is fairly typical in the advertising world. It's that FOMO or fear of missing out, the aspirational message, the promise of future innovation or the lowest priced offer. These are things that you probably have seen done for the last 100 plus years to get people to take action. And the thing about these, as Simon Sinek says, is that these things are only temporary. If you're a business and you're looking to grow and build a sustainable business, then manipulation is not something that you want to continue to do because it's something that you're going to have to do over and over and over again. In his book Start With Why, Simon says that if you have a product or a service that you only are going to have to sell once, that you only need to sell once, you're not concerned about repeat customers. If that's the case, then by all means use manipulation in your advertising. But if that's not the case and you're looking to build a more sustainable business to create raving fans, to have repeat business and have people come back time and time again and refer their friends and family. But if that's the case, then you cannot use manipulation as a tactic. And the reason why is because it does not breed loyalty. The better way and the only other way to influence human behavior is through inspiration, inspiring people to action. And that's what we're going to talk about today. How do you inspire people to action through marketing and advertising? There are four steps that you have to have in order to inspire people to action through your marketing and advertising. But before I get into those, I want to be very clear that the best advertising, the best marketing serves a purpose. And that purpose is to introduce products or services that will allow the end user, the person who buys that product or service to improve their quality of life, to improve their outcomes, improve the results that they are receiving with the product or service. What is the before your product or service, the before state, and what is the after state, the after state, what is that outcome, that result, that benefit that they receive from your product or service, the benefit specifically that makes their life better. This is the value statement. This is your value proposition. What is this? What are the benefits that they're going to receive? You have to understand this in order to jump into the four steps of inspiring people to action. You have to understand how does your product, how does your service make your customer's lives better? If you're a marketing director and you know the answer to that question, then I want you to think of yourself as a matchmaker. I want you to think of yourself as somebody that's going out. You have this perfect product or service, and it might not be perfect in every sense of the word perfect, but it's perfect for the customer that needs it. It's perfect for the person that's looking for that outcome. You have this product or service that's going to give them what they need to make their lives better. You're the matchmaker. You're the one that is introducing this product or service to that person. Because of that, you have a very important job as a marketing professional because you, through your words, through your messages, through your communication, through your advertising, your media buying, your social media posts, through these channels, you're able to improve the quality of life for other people. What are the four steps to inspiring people to action through marketing and advertising? Now the first is understanding and then connecting your brand's purpose to the purpose of your customers. Great marketing connects with people on a human level, and the way to do that is to make sure that the purpose is aligned. When your purpose aligns with the purpose of your customer, then you have a matchmaid in heaven. In order to ensure that your purpose connects with and resonates with your customers, you have to understand who your customers are. You have to understand their pain points. I talked about that before state and the after state. Well obviously the after state is that value proposition. It's that list of benefits that your product or service provides. I'm sure as a marketing director or as somebody marketing your product or service, you probably know those things pretty well. What you have to know even better is you have to understand the before state, which are the pain points, the challenges, the struggles that your customer has, your potential customer has, and you have to understand where they're coming from. What does their typical day look like before your product? What is that struggle that they're going through? What is it that they need? What is it that they want? What is it that they're trying to accomplish? These are the things that you should be asking yourself and making sure that you know because if you don't know where they are now before your product, then it's going to be very hard to connect your purpose with their purpose. Finally, when we're talking about purpose, I want you to understand that you can't just make up a purpose that you think is going to just sound good to the customer. It's not about that. At the very beginning I said that you have to connect your purpose with their purpose. This starts with your purpose. This starts with understanding who you are. What your brand represents and the difference that you're trying to make in the world. If you can understand these things, then you're going to be able to understand how to connect these things to your own customers. Don't just create a purpose statement that will appease your customers because it never does. As a matter of fact, if you do that, then it's never going to work because you're not being authentic. The second step to inspiring people to action through marketing and advertising is messaging. Once you understand how your purpose connects with your audience, with your customers, once you understand how those connections are made, then it's time to begin forming a message around this purpose, around this value proposition. Where do these things connect? This is where you need to begin to think, okay, now it's time to create the message. Messaging is super important when it comes to inspiring people through marketing and advertising. What is that message? Here's what I want you to remember. It needs to connect. Remember this word connection. I want you to, as a marketing leader, as a marketing professional, I want you to always in the back of your mind keep this word connection active. I want you to understand that everything that you say, everything that you do, every advertisement that you put out there needs to connect with other human beings. I know in marketing and advertising, we talk about buyer personas and avatars and all these things. I think sometimes using these terms sometimes makes our process a little less human, maybe a little bit more scientific, if you will. But here's the thing. You have to know that these are real people. You have to make sure that your message connects with them on a human level. Like we just talked about, you have to know this before state. You have to know where they are now because in order to develop a message that resonates, a message that captivates and inspires people to action, that message has to take them from where they are now to where they want to be. The perfect 30 second commercial takes somebody from their before state to their after state. The perfect 30 second commercial can do that. It takes somebody from where they are now, pre your product, before your product. And then it shows them what life is like after your product. It shows them the outcome. It shows them the results. It shows them the benefits. And I can guarantee you if sales are down, it always goes back to what is the message? It always goes back to what is the offer? What is it that you are communicating? If you're not getting enough people to fill out your conversion form, if you're not getting enough people to walk through the doors of your retail store, whatever the case may be, it always comes back to the fact that your message is not connecting the before state to the after state. Okay, so now you have a purpose that very clearly connects to your customers, your potential customers. And you have a message that clearly articulates how your purpose connects to your customer's purpose. At this point, step number three is the creative. I've met a lot of amazing marketing people that really know how to frame a message, how to connect the message to the end user, to the potential customer. But then when it comes to the creative, the collateral, the website, it's just not there. Poorly designed, poorly presented messages have a way of making those messages less trustworthy. Poor design creates a situation where your offer is not believable because it's not credible. Trust me. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. Poor design is always going to have a negative effect on your eventual outcomes. This is something that people just pick up on. You don't have to be a marketing expert or a graphic expert, a creative artist to understand that poor design really has a negative effect subconsciously on how people view a brand in terms of credibility and trustworthiness. So here's what you need to do when it comes to your creative. Number one, I want you to connect that after state very visually in your creative. I want you to show people, people who look like your customers, people that are in... If you are advertising a marketing to doctors, then you need to have doctors in your creative. They might not be real doctors, but it's got to be people that look like doctors because people respond to advertising when they see people who look like them that are in their shoes. So number one, you need to have creative that has people like them experiencing the outcomes that they want to experience. So whatever that after state is, we're back to this again. We're back to that value proposition. Whatever that list of benefits are, you need to be able to show those benefits and those customers, those, you know, those avatars, personas. You need to show these people experiencing that after state in your creative. Now that alone will do wonders for you, but here's how you can level up even more. Remember that each channel, each platform has a certain way of being, a certain way of looking and feeling. For instance, when you're on Facebook, things look a certain way. They look different than if you were on LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram. And I'm not just talking about sizes and formats. I'm talking about the presentation. And these designs are going to look completely different than, you know, a print piece or an outdoor billboard or a television commercial. The point that I'm trying to make that I want you to understand is that every platform has a different way of presenting visually messaging. And so rather than just creating one message and trying to fit that into each place, like, you know, hammering it into each place where you want to advertise it, actually, you know, take a step back and take the time, invest in graphic designers who can take that message and shape it in a way that fits the network, the channel, the platform, the medium that it is going to be on. This will help you connect at a higher level with your customers. The final step, step number four, is distribution. Once you have a purpose that connects to your customer's purpose and you're able to communicate that effectively with the message that resonates, and then you're able to visually present that in a way that captivates people and draws them in and grabs their attention, then at this point you need to put that message in front of the right people at the right time and in the right places, okay? So as a marketing professional, you should know your customers inside and out. One of understanding your customers inside and out is understanding where they hang out, whether that be, you know, what magazines they're reading, what channels they're watching, what Facebook groups they belong to, or what searches they are typing into Google. You need to know these things about your potential customers so that you can begin to put your perfectly designed on-point messages in those places where they'll see them. This is the right message, right person, right place, right time. This is the holy grail of marketing, and when it comes down to it, if you want to inspire people to action through marketing and advertising, then you can't neglect this fourth step. You can't just create a magazine ad, throw it in a magazine, spend a couple thousand dollars on a full page ad, and expect people to be moved by it, or frankly, to expect people to see it, okay? You've got to understand where people are. That message might have to be optimized depending on where they are. Definitely the visual, the graphics, the creative will need to be optimized, but once you understand where they are, then you can put that message into the right place, and that is going to help you to inspire them to action. Now, if you're a marketing director and you're like, Tyler, this is exactly everything I believe. This is exactly what I've been trying to do. I know exactly what you're talking about, Tyler, and I've tried to do this, but I just need some help. I need a team. I'm here by myself. I'm trying to make this work. I've got great ideas. I have a vision. I need a team to be able to help me execute on it. Well, that's where SLAM comes in. We can be your outsourced marketing team, and I would love to sit down, maybe over Zoom, and chat about your needs, your objectives, and how we can get you from point A to point B and beyond. If you've enjoyed this show, be sure to, number one, hit me up in the comments. Any questions? Let me know. If you're on a podcast network, be sure to subscribe and do me a favor, share this with a colleague, and let them know that every Monday morning we release marketing insights, best practices, and ideas to help businesses just like yours grow. Thank you for tuning in. I will see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you saw, subscribe and hit that bell. You'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live. After that, you can watch more videos from SLAM Agency. We picked something we think you'll love.