We’re living in an environment that’s choking with media clutter and mixed messages.

In our inboxes each day we receive new, but mostly regurgitated, ideas on how to attract new business and increase sales.

It all sounds great but how many businesses implement any of them?

Rising above the noise is difficult and demands a certain amount of effort and out-of-the-box thinking.

Sure, it’s easy for the bigger brands to stand out with a finely-tuned message. For one, they are a known entity, and more importantly, they have massive budgets.

Don’t try to imitate them.

Borrow some ideas for sure, but come up with your own unique message, one that will truly resonate with your customers.

Build Awareness

If you’re the new kid on the block or even if you’ve been in business for years and you’re looking to expand your customer base, one of the first things you should do is build awareness of your brand.

Building a sizeable awareness can be tricky, but we see lots of companies popping out of nowhere and wonder, “How did they do that?”

It turns out that creative thinking is the answer.

Uniqlo’s Success – Partner with Others

Take the Japanese retailer Uniqlo. The retail giant has close to 2,000 stores across the globe, including 47 in the U.S.

In November 2006, Uniqlo opened its first U.S. store in the SoHo section of Manhattan.

To build brand awareness, the company partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013, part of a multi-year sponsor initiative. Everyone who availed of the museum’s Friday night free admission program got a Uniqlo tote as a reward.

This helped get the Uniqlo name in front of a new audience who were more than satisfied to get free admission to the museum as well as a cool gift.

How can your smaller business achieve a level of success by partnering with others? Some ideas include becoming a sponsor of an industry conference, partnering with a local non-profit’s charity drive, or on a smaller scale, sponsoring a local networking group.

Explain it Clearly

If anything, your website is prime real estate for explaining what you do. Too often, visitors arrive on a website and are puzzled.

Content marketing guru Neil Patel gives two examples of good and bad marketing messages.

This one, he says, doesn’t give people a clear idea of what this company does:

“A platform that combines task management and email management for better productivity,”

as opposed to this one:

“A place for people to GET SH*T DONE at work.”

Which one do you think will spark an emotional response?

Patel’s post about choosing the right words includes the expertise of copywriter John Carlton, who explains the importance of proper messaging to a company’s content marketing efforts.

In his e-book, “Power Words,” Carlton’s says it’s best to use “action verbs to pump copy.” Sometimes verbs convey action. Other times, he adds, the best words to use are “nouns with shock value.” A wicked phrase or a twist on a cliché is all part of Carlton’s copywriting arsenal.

Here are some examples of the kinds of words that Carlton has used in various copywriting campaigns.

Keeping Your Brand Promise

If you’re going to include a promise as part of your marketing efforts, you better be prepared to back it up with quality service and results.

I’m sure you’ve seen these kinds of promises on websites and in emails before. In fact, I just saw one from International Living, a website that promises to help Americans “live, retire and invest overseas.”

The email titled, “Urgent: Claim Thousands of Extra Dollars in Retirement Income,” was a long message assuring readers they could get “tens of thousands of additional dollars in Social Security benefits” if they downloaded a certain PDF.

The email cited a publication and an author they recommended as being an authority in the space. Wouldn’t readers want to find out about the “loophole” that could increase their retirement income, allowing them to live a more comfortable life either here in the U.S. or abroad?

From the consumer’s point of view, it’s always a good idea to be cautious about such offers. I’m not saying that what International Living is promising is false, but as Patel describes it, “push the envelope of believability and destroy your message completely.” The lesson here: be careful about what you promise.

It’s not a bad idea to look at other businesses that have successfully promised the world and delivered.

Disney is one of them. Its message, “Creating happiness through magical experiences” is known the world over and is surely believed by anyone who has ever visited a Disney park.

LL Bean is another company that delivers on its promise. Anyone who has ever purchased an LL Bean product wouldn’t disagree. The quality of the products and the company’s customer service is next to none.

Sharing Your Opinion

If you’re not afraid to share your opinion and set yourself apart as an industry expert, then guest posting is for you. It’s a great way to get your name and the name of your business out there and to show the world that you are an authority in your industry.

What is guest posting, you ask? It’s basically publishing an article on another website or blog other than your own.

The process, given that you maintain a blog of your own, also allows you to reiterate your message over and over again, and hopefully, that will resonate with readers and potential customers.

But there’s another key advantage. Guest posting is also great for search engine traffic because when you post on someone else’s blog, they will include a link to your website.

Known as backlinks, this is a great strategy for building your online presence and as a result, the success of your business.

Start with smaller sites that will be open to accepting your posts, seek out bloggers in your industry and ask them if they’d be willing to accept your post. Or, sign up to blog on Medium.com. See the publishing guidelines here.

If you’re not comfortable guest posting online, don’t worry. There are other opportunities to get your message out there.

How about serving as a guest columnist in your local weekly newspaper? The editor may agree to it on a preliminary basis and if your content is well received by the publication’s readership, you might just have a regular gig on your hands.

Be Prepared to Test

Like any venture, getting your message right may take some time. Perhaps it needs to be tested or tweaked a little bit. That’s ok. If you use the strategies above, you should be able to determine what message works and what doesn’t.

If you’re interested in getting more exposure in the local community in 2019, an opportunity that can land you in front of thousands of readers all across Westchester County, shoot me an email at [email protected] and let’s talk.