What’s on the outside counts too!

This post is all about the importance of how you present and deliver your marketing messages.  Content may be king, but if that content is delivered inappropriately, no one will read it.

Here’s a recent example of what I mean.

I was emailed today by a company that wanted me to buy some software.  I could tell that from the subject line of their email.  However, I have no idea what their software does or even how compelling their offer was.  That’s because I never read their marketing message.

Why?

Because they emailed me using the free version of an emailing program, which inserted advertisements all over their marketing message.  It immediately drew my attention away from their marketing message and caused me to wonder why they were using such a low class way of marketing their services. After all, emailing software is not expensive these days.

I drew a number of immediate, negative conclusions about the company that was trying to market to me.  After all, how professional are they likely to be?  They have just shown me, (and everyone else on their list), that they either think it’s OK for pictures of semi naked women advertising online casinos to be plastered all over their messages, or they were too unprofessional to check first.  In either case, I was unimpressed.

My conclusions may or may not have been correct, but that’s not important.  What’s important is that the way they delivered and presented their marketing to me, caused me to ask myself questions about them that they could easily have avoided.

More importantly, and the reason for this post, I was unimpressed before I even knew what they were offering!

The way they chose to present and deliver their marketing was enough in itself, to ruin any chance they had of winning my business.  You might think that this is a rare example, but I see it many times every day.  All day long I see people, who make such a mess of how they present and deliver their marketing message, that their message never gets the oxygen it needs, in order to work.

Here are some very common examples:

• People who email you marketing messages, without your permission. They just add your email address to their list and spam you.
• People who cold call you, reading from a script, showing you no respect for your individuality or needs.
• People who have never previously connected with you, sending you messages on Twitter, with a link to a sales page for their wonder product.
• People who walk up to you at a networking event and give you a sales pitch, whilst looking over your shoulder, eyeing up their next ‘victim.’

The bottom line here, is that if we want people to take our marketing seriously, we need to create a powerful, professional impression.  We need to do everything possible to encourage them to trust us – and that includes the way we present and deliver our marketing messages, not just the content of those messages.