Hot Buttons & Strategic Marketing

Evaluate your inside reality.

What is your expertise?

What makes you unique?

Evaluate your outside perception.

Why do your current customers do business with you?

What makes you unique in the marketplace?

What is important and relevant to your customers and prospects when it comes to what you provide?

How can prospects differentiate you based on your marketing and advertising?

Hot Buttons – DISCOVERY (steps 1 – 6)

(5 of 14 discovery questions)

These questions are designed to help you determine your target market’s Hot Buttons and pinpoint what the relevant issues are so you can effectively educate and build a case.  Answering these questions is the first step in writing powerful marketing, and must be completed prior to writing headlines, Master Letters, or lead generators.  Answer these questions as fully as possible.

The Qualification question:

Under what circumstances do your typical prospects start to think about buying what you sell?

Hot Buttons – The Customer values question:

What things are important to your prospects when buying what you sell?  What would cause me to get on the educational spectrum at Point A?  List as many possibilities as you can think of, without worrying about the order.  Consider both the product/service itself and the buying process.  Then think in terms of what the prospects want AND what prospects want to avoid.  Ask your existing customers, publish a web poll and ask people.  (If you see some things on the customer list of values you don’t currently provide, then you have some innovation opportunities.

Need to Know Question:

What are the relevant and important issues that a prospect needs to be aware of when making a decision?

Case Building Question:

What do you do to give the customer what he wants?

Hot Buttons – Evidence Question:

What would the typical prospect need to see or hear to feel like they had enough information… and be in control of making the best decision possible?

Evidence Type	Specific Evidence You Can Gather
Articles/Press Stories
Associations
Awards
Books
Charts & Graphs
Client Lists
Comparisons
Compliance Checklists
Earnings Reports
Endorsements
Examples of Savings
Expertise Tests
Facts & Figures
Performance Audits
Photos / Videos
Product Demos
Quotes
Standards Lists
Statistics
Technical Drawings
Tests / Lab Results
Testimonials (witnesses) No platitudes here! Customers, bank, suppliers,

 

What are your prospect’s hot buttons – what is important and relevant to them?

Brainstorm powerful hot button words to use.

Brainstorm headlines.

Brainstorm sub-headlines.

HOT BUTTON HEADLINES

The headline is the first opportunity you have to interrupt the prospect.  Since you only have a split second to interrupt the prospect, you’d better make sure that your headline has activators in it… and that the activators are based on things that are important or relevant – or in other words, HOT BUTTONS.   Hot Buttons are words and phrases that describe familiar problems that the prospect is feeling, so that their reticular activator will latch on to them and snap them from Alpha Mode into Beta Mode.  In advertising – magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc. – the headline is printed at the top, usually in large letters.  In radio and television, it’s the first sentence spoken.  In brochures, websites and marketing collateral it’s the first thing the prospect sees.

We typically write 100 – 200 headlines for our consulting clients to find the few REALLY powerful ones using all three methods.  The reason we use all three methods is first, it takes a lot of writing to get those really, really, REALLY powerful ones that truly interrupt the prospect and make them pay attention.  Second, you’re going to need all those headlines to complete all those marketing pieces you’re going to create.  You’ll need headlines for lead generators, reports, emails, etc.  You can use a headline more than once, but over the course of a marketing campaign, you’re going to need a lot of different headlines to continually test which ones work best.  Third, a lot of headlines will give you the ability to mix and match them in a lot of ways to see which ones work best together.  You’ll find that some headlines interrupt, some engage and some do both.  You’ll need to have a full quiver of headlines to mix and match to come up with the optimal usage and order. 

There are three basic types of headlines:

Plain English Headlines

To write a headline in Plain English, first call out to your target market then pepper him/her with Hot Buttons.  Since most people don’t feel like they’re very creative, use this fail-safe shortcut to get you started: Take your answer to the first and second Discovery Question, the Qualification Question and then the Customer Values question an use them to simply make a statement.  For example:

If your website is five or more years old and starting to look outdated, and you’re worried about losing prospective customers to your competitors… (Qualification Question)

…and you’d like to build a new highly engaging website that will attract your best prospects, get them to engage with you, download your free audios, videos and whitepapers to learn more about what are the criteria required to make this happen… Then I’d like to talk to you.  (Customer Values Question)

Headline Starters

Headline Starters are really just categories that headlines can fall under.  Use them if your mind goes blank when you’re trying to write headlines.  Ultimately, the point of headline starters is to help you get started writing headlines in Plain English.  Use the following categories to get you going:

Category	Words to use (Hot buttons)	Write a Headline in this Category
News	New, Finally, Introducing, At last…	Finally – A Marketing Company Who Really Understands How Marketing Is Supposed to Work! Introducing – A Marketing System That’s Guaranteed to Generate More Sales!
Inflammatory	Steal, Squash, Pulverize, Destroy…
How-to
Questions
Testimonials
Guarantees
Comparisons	Virtually All Marketing Companies…
Bold Claims
Problem / Solution
Numbers
Offers

 

Hot Buttons & The Headline Bank

The basic concept is to emulate existing headlines to create powerful new ones.  (See the Headline Bank starter version for ideas.)  The entire bank of 175 headlines is available as a Strategic Marketing client.

Hot Buttons in The Master Letter

The Master Letter is essentially a case briefing.  It’s a snapshot of your strategic marketing plan that utilizes all of the information you gathered during the discovery process, as well as the headlines you’ve written.  The Master Letter should follow the marketing equation – it should Capture, Connect, Incentivize, Educate, and Offer.

The Master Letter is “the most important letter you’ll every write for your business… even if you never send it to anyone.”  Why?  Because once you have the Master Letter done, you will have all the information at your fingertips in a well-written, powerfully stated format that you can quickly and easily draw on to write any other piece of marketing you could need.

Like an ad, the Master Letter should start with a Hot Button headline drawn from the first Discovery question which is the Qualification question.  Be sure to write the Master Letter using plain English just like you use when you talk.  Keep sentences short, simple and conversational.

Ad Writing Evaluation Worksheet (pgs. 32 – 33)

Lead Generator Template (p. 34)

Industry Category Strategies

Industry category strategies are general guidelines to help you implement the marketing equation for various types of businesses within certain categories. 

Major industry categories that nearly all businesses fall into and we’ve found that within those industry categories the strategies that should be used are usually very similar. 

Industry Categories:	Examples	Strategy(s)			Hot Buttons
Service Providers	Plumbers, roofers, HVAC, etc.		The “Standard Bearer”	Lack of knowledge about what constitutes a good deal
Professional Service Providers	Financial Planners, Accountants, Consultants, Doctors, Attorneys, etc.		“Cliff’s Notes”	Lack of understanding of what distinguishes one provider from another.
Mass Retailers	Auto dealerships, Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, Publix, or any store that sells commodities that can be found in other stores, etc.		“Consumer’s Report” or the “Value Added Services”	Lack of knowledge about what constitutes a good deal
Specialty Retailers & Wholesalers	Restaurants, Health Clubs, Spa, Golf Courses, Entertainment venues of all types, etc.		Build a voracious case that defends your place in the marketplace.	Lack of understanding of what distinguishes one provider from another.
Companies that sell to resellers	Manufacturers		“Make More Money”	Make more money
(Products sold to end users)	Automobiles, beer, soft drinks, food or cleaning products, etc.		“Phantom Position”	Lack of understanding of what distinguishes one product from another.
Products with a defendable position	Computers, Pianos, Cars, Cruises, Watches, Shoes, Furniture, Lawn Mowers, Insect Killer, Pens, Books, etc.		“Build a case for that product’s unique & innovative inside reality”	Lack of knowledge about what constitutes a good deal
Products with no defendable position	(Soft drinks, toothpaste, laundry products,		“Phantom Position”	Lack of understanding of what distinguishes one product from another.

 

For Service Providers you need to educate your prospects as to what he needs to know, what the standards are and how to judge for himself.  You need to use what we call “The Standard Bearer” strategy.  This scares the crap out of most service providers because it means it will expose the crummy inside realities of many providers because they don’t provide a fair value for the money.  They can’t hold up the ‘standards’… and we say that’s good because it will drive these low-life providers out of business because they’re ripping people off.  Either that or they’ll have to get up to snuff and comply with the standards of doing business in your industry.

For Professional Service Providers what you need to do is educate your prospects on what you do and how you do it.  We call this “The Cliff’s Notes” strategy.  What you want to do is download your brain into the prospect’s brain and you do this by modeling what the “Cliff’s Notes” booklets of the past did for the big books you didn’t want to read.  Show him how to be what you are… in an abbreviated format.  All your certificates and credentials are outside proof of your expertise, but a “Cliff’s Notes” of how to do what you do is proof of your inside reality.  This can be done with CD/DVD, written report or other medium that enables you to download your expertise into your prospect’s brain.  It’s all about instilling confidence in the mind of your prospect that you know what you’re doing.

With Mass Retailers you’ve got two strategies available to you; the “Consumer’s Report” strategy where you compare and contrast various options within a commodity category in a brand-by-brand, side-by-side, head-to-head basis.  The second strategy is what we call “Value-added Services” strategy which means you have to find ways to provide more service, more value than any of your competitors but at the same price as everyone else.  One way would be to research every model available in the market of a product you want to sell and produce report that reveals all the important and relevant issues and compares every model on all those criteria including the price.  Create separate reports for every product category and run separate ads for each category providing the consumer with the most comprehensive report that outlines every model on the market and the top X models that meet your stringent requirements.  Group the models in several price categories and rate each one based on the important and relevant hot buttons for your market.  Make the report available to prospects for free and without having to talk to anyone.

For the value-added services strategy, think about what other items or accessories your prospect may want or need to buy that is related to your product and if you’re margins are good, give away some of these things the customer may need to buy after buying what you sell in order to persuade them to do business with you. 

When it comes to Specialty Retailers and Wholesalers one strategy is to state your unique position in the marketplace and then build a voracious case that defends your unique place in the marketplace.  One option might be to create an “Inventory Update List” that is published each week that lists everything that has come in since last week.  Offer prospects the ability to subscribe to receive this list each week.  Specialty Retailers will need to rely heavily on the maximizing and optimizing strategies explained later.

For companies that sell to resellers such as manufacturers, the strategy is called “Make More Money”.  Distributors simply want to make more money. 

Products sold to end users such as automobiles, beer, soft drinks, food or cleaning products, etc.  Most consumer products we see advertised on television fit into this category.  This is the category for most things you buy at a retail store.  The only factor to consider is whether the product has a defendable position in the marketplace or not.

The challenge with products that do not have a defendable place in the marketplace such as soft drinks, beer, toothpaste, laundry products, gasoline and other consumer products and packaged goods that you simply can’t identify a foundation upon which to build a case in the first place.  Therefore, for these types of products we have to create a position in the marketplace and promote the attributes of the product as if they were real – a “Phantom Position.”  “Build a case for that product’s unique & innovative inside reality”

Franchise (Systematize) Your Marketing (Sales) System

“Victory goes to the one with superior forces at the point of contact.” – Sun Tzu

Defined or Non-defined target market

A Defined Target Market means you can identify, pinpoint and obtain a comprehensive list of your target market.  You can obtain this list and cost-effectively market directly to your all of your prospects on an ongoing basis usually email or mail using a hopper system.

A Non-defined target market means you cannot identify, pinpoint and obtain a comprehensive list of your target market or that list is too huge to manage in a cost-effective way.

When it comes to identifying appropriate media for your lead generation, there’s only about ten major categories of media to choose from: Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, telemarketing, Internet, signs, trade shows, directories and mail.

You can of course break these major categories into sub-categories.  TV comes in two varieties: broadcast and cable.  Newspapers and magazine include community weekly’s, local dailies, national, specialized, subscription-based and free distribution.  Internet sub-categories include websites, SEO, PPC, banner ads, social media, directories, review sites, content and email.  In the mail category you have letters, postcards, oversized, card decks, flyers, door hangers and piggyback mailers.  Signs include billboards, specialty roadside, in-store, vehicle wraps, T-shirts, tradeshow, all the way down to the backside of grocery receipts and more.

But there are only ten major categories and that’s good.  That’s because only two or three are likely to make sense for your business.

When it comes to choosing where to place your lead generation ads, follow the formula: Think, Ask, Check and Survey.

Think about what advertising media will likely work best.

Ask your customers which media they use or access.

Check with those media to see if any other companies similar to yours are already advertising there.

Survey other businesses that are advertising in the media your considering and ask how it’s going for them.

YOUR TACTIAL MARKETING PLAN AND BUDGET

Marketing is the most important activity in your business.  It offers you leverage.  Its upside potential is unlimited.  Every other function in your business is subservient to marketing.  I believe you should spend as much money on marketing as you can afford.  Of course, you don’t want to spend money on the wrong marketing program.  You only want to spend your hard-earned cash on a marketing plan that’s deeply rooted in the marketing equation.  You only want to invest in a plan that you have tested in small-scale tests to ensure a return on your marketing investment when you roll it out on a larger scale.

You should maximize your investment in marketing because it will make the biggest difference in your company’s bottom line.  Marketing offers you the ultimate leverage in your business.  It allows you to create a “profit faucet.”  If you can figure out how to generate qualified leads, why wouldn’t you want to generate as many leads as you could handle?  Assuming that those leads are profitable, why would you want to limit the number of leads – and the amount of money you could make – to some arbitrary number some bean counter calls “the budget?”

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