The 5 Great Laws of Marketing

VIOLATE MARKETING LAWS AT YOUR OWN PERIL!

The word “law” has power. That may be why it often gets overused and also generates so many attacks. Today we talk about the 5 Great Laws of Marketing, which should be immune from criticism, and should be ignored at your own peril.

Too many business owners that practice marketing are poorly equipped for that critical task. Their instruction and/or their background - centers on technique, not results. With that background, they can’t compete with those who recognize the one and only purpose of a sales message: to cause the message recipient to perform a positive act as the direct result of exposure to the message.
 
5 Great Laws of Marketing 

Although they’re simple, easy, and obvious, these laws give you no assurance that you will create a brilliant sales message. Rather, they give you assurance that, by observing them, you cannot create a stinky message. 

The first Great Law gets attention:
The First 3 Seconds:  This is your chance to get the interest of your potential customer. If what you say isn’t entertaining, interesting, or intriguing enough in under 3 seconds, you’re out. People don’t have time to pay attention to things that don’t interest them. Even if they would love your product or service, if you can’t communicate something to catch their attention quickly they won’t listen.  

For this reason, the first 3 seconds can’t include details. The potential customer doesn’t want details at this point. If you try to front-load as much information as you possibly can in your initial attempt to get attention, your potential customer will reject it. As far as they’re concerned, you haven’t earned the right to put information in their brain at this point.

You really only have time to present one idea, which should be related to the main benefit you can offer a consumer. To be memorable this idea has to be emotionally engaging. To be effective it has to be informative. To be both memorable and effective is your goal.
If you do catch their attention in those critical first few seconds, they will stop and pay attention to see if you continue to interest them. This means you have their permission to draw them farther into your message.

The second Great Law gives direction:
Reach and influence, at the lowest logical cost, the most people who can and will respond. Don’t mistake the meaning of this law. It isn’t an imperative for cheap production. Rather, it’s an imperative against overproduction. Technicians value production. Genuine marketers value response.

Unlike the Madison Avenue mantra “Reach the most people,” you don’t want to reach the most people.  You want to reach the most people who can and will respond to our sales message. Shooting blindly for high circulation, much of which is pure waste, should not be your strategy.

The third Great Law is a caution for sanity:
In this Age of Skepticism, cleverness for the sake of cleverness may well be a marketing liability rather than an asset.  Cleverness for the sake of selling something is great. Cleverness to show off - not so much.

The fourth Great Law is a caution for restraint:
If you emphasize everything in your marketing copy, you emphasize nothing.  So if you have been writing and/or running headlines such as “44 reasons why you should buy now,” stop. You’re not isolating the key selling argument and subordinating the rest. You’re telling the reader, “What interests you is in here somewhere. I’m not sure what it is, so fish for it.” That’s unprofessional.

The fifth Great Law is the payoff:
You tell the reader/viewer/listener what to do.  Curiously, although this law should be the easiest and the most obvious, it’s the most violated.  You can easily find advertisement after advertisement, mailing after mailing, e-mail after e-mail, waxing elegantly about a product or service but never making the compelling point.  The whole point of salesmanship is lost if we don’t tell our targeted audience what to do.

Taken together, these 5 Great Laws of Marketing are deceptive.  They seem so obvious, so common-sense, and yet if you have been nodding your head in agreement as you’ve been reading them, don’t forget the next step - to make sure your own marketing messages are congruent with the 5 Great Laws. You may not always have a winner on your hands, but you’ll know you haven’t created a loser.

DAILY PRAYER  
Lord, help us to clearly identify our results and expectations, and then to execute with brilliance.  With a genuine desire to add value to the lives of our customers through our products and services, help us to communicate with clarity, conciseness and to be compelling.  In Jesus name, Amen.

Five Laws - not too much to remember or to heed.