Marketing Plan

1 Minute Exercise to Writing Better Marketing Messages

Posted on by Anthony James

Why is so hard to write a marketing message in one sentence?

Use these Marketing Plan Templates (5 x MS Word templates and 10 Excel spreadsheets) to summarize the Who, What, Where, When, and How questions of marketing and sales activities for the planning year. 

  • Analyze your competitors in order to position your product or service
  • Develop your product so that it meet customers’ needs
  • Ensure pricing matches customers’ expectations and spending habits
  • Define the promotion, advertising and PR you’ll adopt
  • Identify specific marketing events or actions that will increase sales
  • Deliver a cohesive plan that becomes your blueprint to marketing success

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I’ll be honest, I’ve never loved grammar. It goes back to primary school and trying to pronounce the ‘tion’ is introduction.

“Is it… t on?”

“No, it’s pronounced shun… like a… ten… shun…”

To this day, thirty five years later, I can still see the teacher angrily telling me that ‘tion’ is pronounced ‘shun’. Hard to grasp when you’re seven. 

Later, I grew to love English and made a huge effort to wrestle nouns, verbs, adjectives under control.

Next, I started to write fiction. And like most beginners, fell at every hurdle.

One kind teacher, Miss Maloney, shared this nugget:

  • Verbs – do
  • Adjectives – describe

It mightn’t sound like much but it gave me a grammar template I could reference when diagramming my text.

1 Minute Exercise To Write Better Marketing Messages

So, how can you apply this to marketing or any other type of writing where you want to boil down the text? 

Remember Do and Describe?

  • Do – What does your business, service, or blog do?
  • Describe – How does your small business, service or blog do this?

You build your core marketing message around this. Sound too simplistic?

What does Apple do?

  • Create gadgets.
  • How does it do it?
  • Making them so beautiful you must have them.

What does Google do?

  • Build a Search Engine.
  • How does it do it?
  • By helping you find better information than anyone else.

Let’s try your business.

  • Get out your laptop, open a page, and write your business name at the top.
  • Write two verbs and three adjectives that:
  • Describe your business and
  • Tell people what you’re doing (two or three adjectives max)

I’ve created an example below to show how easy it is:

Business Name: White Paper Writer

Verbs: help, write, publish

Adjectives: positive, personality, speed 

This is the ‘bones’ of your marketing message. What we need to do next is wrap a few sentences around these key verbs and adjectives.

For example:

  • White Paper Writing Guru gives your sales documents more personality. Our fully trained writers will provide you with the direction you need to develop better documents on time.
  • White Paper Writing Guru helps publish your documents faster.
  • White Paper Writing Guru gives your words a positive message.

Instead of describing what you do or using credentials, highlight the value you provide.

  • What value do you deliver?
  • Why should people pay you?
  • Why should they care?
Anthony James