Messaging makes or breaks your postcard campaigns

Your writing style is extremely important in your marketing. It’s how your customers and potential clients perceive you, how authoritative they think you are, and whether they trust you enough to pick up the phone and buy from you!

And yet despite this, many small business owners totally write-it-in for their postcard campaigns (excuse the pun, but on this one we had to). We know, because we watch them go out every week. They’re simply going with the first draft of whatever they jotted down and not thinking about whether their message is actually effective.

Let’s take a look together at what really effective messaging looks like. 

Examine these two advertisements. As a customer, what do you notice?

At Janet’s Landscaping, we use top of the line mowers and edgers. 

You will love how lush your lawn looks, only with Janet’s Landscaping.

Pretty obvious which is more appealing, right? The second one jumps right to what I want as a customer, which is a beautiful lawn. The first one on the other hand presumes that I know that mowers and edgers equate to a good lawn, but it takes mental effort. Don’t make your customer do work, come right out and say it in their terms!

So now, here’s the message that nobody likes to hear.

You’re out there advertising like the first one!

We’re all guilty of a little self-centeredness. It’s only natural, after all, we know what we ourselves like and how we like to say it! However, if you’re not speaking in terms of what your customers want to hear, people are throwing away your postcards before they get to the good stuff and dragging down your response rate and ROI.

And we won’t stand for that! Your success is our success, and we’re in this together. So without further adieu … 

Here are our top 6 tips to help you speak in your audiences’ language:

1. Know your audience. Get used to speaking in terms of the value propositions for each of your buyer personas. Maybe John and Jane newlywed are most interested in a clean yard where their kids won’t get hurt, whereas Sally apartment complex owner expects her lawn to help attract new renters. The same value proposition wouldn’t work for both, so make sure you’re got the right one!

2. Use the acronym WIIFM: Or, “What’s in it for me.” It’s what your customer thinks when they read your offer. Every time you write something, ask yourself what’s in it for your customer and if it doesn’t clearly tie back to a tangible benefit like more revenue or saved time, keep trying.

3. Change your writing style to fit the situation:  

• For selling to households, make your postcards bright and colorful and folksy sounding! Take the tone of being a neighbor and reference things that only a local would know.
• When your services are big life decisions, like accounting, insurance, and investment, sound solid, authoritative, and reliable.
• For marketing to local businesses, get to the point! They’re busy and if they don’t see the value proposition in the first three-seconds, you’ve lost them.
• For triggered campaigns on specific events like birthdays or moving into a new house, share in their enthusiasm!

4. Use analogies: Using analogies is like building a suspension bridge between the value proposition of your message and your audiences’ front door. See what I did there? Analogies allow you to use mental shortcuts to help customers understand more quickly and in less words. For example, “Great landscaping is like a complete makeover for your home!”

5. Use powerful descriptors. I recently followed my wife into a makeup store called Sephora and I was blown away by the word choice in there. There are thousands of products and each of them have only a few words to capture your attention, so they do a breathtaking job: Vivid. Effortless. Luminous. Purifying. Glowing. Clay. Do these jump out at you or what? Use them, and here’s a list of 100 powerful adjectives to get you started.

6. Once you’ve finished your first draft, start over. Why? Because as you write your ideas will change and your message will improve. Whenever we write headlines for these articles we write no less than six and each one improves upon the last, until we have something that’s truly attention grabbing.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? Six simple tips that you can follow to start speaking in terms of what your customers care about so that your postcards really hit home.

Ready to turn your new panache for writing into revenue?

While you might not feel like the next Stephen King, ready to churn out a novel worth of postcards, don’t worry! We can help with your postcard marketing writing if you just give our friendly folks a call at 1-877-222-6010. Together, we’ll use writing to help you reap huge returns!