Beyond Facts: Creating a Marketing Strategy That Sizzles

Here on the InMotion Hosting blog we have a lot of articles about how to run various online marketing campaigns. But when first starting out, you can do well for yourself and your business to start with the simplest of tools: pen and paper. From this humble beginning, you can start to craft the most important part of your online marketing campaigns, which is the content of your message.

When first starting out with a campaign, you might be tempted to focus solely on the facts, the data, the math. At one point or another, every business has been guilty of this. It’s easy to put too many facts or factoids about your company into your online marketing content or business writing. To a certain extent, facts serve a purpose. Facts provide some context about your business. They build up your credibility in your industry. But how many facts should you put in your online marketing strategy? How many facts fit well in an email newsletter, Facebook ad, or blog post before your target reader is exhausted? It might be less than you think.

Do Facts Matter in Marketing Content?
Why We Like Facts
Stronger Content Beyond Facts
Best Practices For Online Marketing

Do Facts Matter in Marketing Content?

Facts basically deliver the raw data. They can help you establish credibility by presenting the relevant information about your product. Does your product outperform your competitor in a measurable way? If so, that’s a fact you might put forward. But in the end, heavy facts with no content make for a boring fact-bloated marketing campaign that will fail to persuade anyone why your product is worth considering.

Here are some facts:

80% of customers don’t care about the data
8 out 10 prospects make a buying decision without factual information
20% of leads generate enough profit to sustain most businesses
Most facts are exaggerated — and savvy customers know that

None of the points above are established “facts,” but they are persuasive because they point in the direction of the truth: most of your marketing strategy is about thinking beyond the facts and getting to the bottom line.

When it comes to creating persuasive marketing content, facts don’t matter as much.

How Much Content Is Needed?

Anyone who sells a product must have at least some passion in the product itself. Maybe your mattress has the best coils. Maybe your bakery uses the finest of high quality ingredients. We like to give facts about our business because we know our industry, and we know how our product performs in key industry categories.

But, to take the bakery example, all your customer cares about is the taste of the cake and whether you can deliver the goods on time. The customer doesn’t care what ingredients you used, unless they have dietary requirements, or they happen to be in the cake business too. In selling a cake, your marketing strategy should be focused on creating bright, happy future memories of the occasion for which your customer is buying the cake.

It’s no different for other products. Your job in marketing your goods and services begins with delivering a vision to your customer of how great their life will be if they decide to buy your product.

In the process of creating marketing content that sells, your content should only contain about 10% facts, the rest should go beyond them.

Stronger Content Beyond Facts

So now that you know only about 10% of your marketing material should be strictly facts, what’s left to fill that remaining 90%?

Stories: Stories provide some of the most powerful brain glue for your brand. People are hard-wired to pay extra close attention to stories. In particularly vivid stories, the application of sensory detail (descriptivenes) instantly makes an impression on the reader and demands their attention.
Conceptual information: Product A might be better than Product B according to the data and statistics, but what does that mean to a customer who doesn’t know much about industry data? Why someone should choose Product A or B comes down to relating conceptual information in a way the reader understands. Sometimes it might be an analogy, sometimes a popular idiom, or good old fashioned salesmanship.
Images: Strong, evocative imagery means more than picking a stock photo from the web. Use a bit of Photoshop to mix it up and create something new that would be striking to the viewer’s eye.
Case studies: Some of the most engaging contents comes from stories about people who have used a product and found success with it. This gives your potential customer a chance to see how the product can work for them on a personal level. But, be careful, it’s easy to bloat a case study with marketing jargon or extra facts. Focus on the people.

Best Practices For Online Marketing

So that you have a better understand of how a content strategy creates a vision for your potential customer, challenge yourself to get your content out there by following some of these guides: