Lindy Tentinger is the President of VGM Forbin, a digital marketing and technology company.
If there is anything I have learned as a marketer for over 20 years, it is this: People don’t read. In fact, according to Time, it is likely that many people who started this article have already left since a third of “visitors spend less than 15 seconds reading articles they land on.”
Businesses today must try harder than ever to break through the clutter and capture the interest of their customers and prospective customers. Even in B2B marketing, we are competing to get to decision makers as the line between consumer and business messaging has become increasingly blurry, if not nonexistent.
Every day, we are all bombarded with messages. Some we take a moment to look at (not even necessarily read), and some we never even notice crossed our path. The best brands have figured out mass personalization and how to successfully get conversions. However, even the best brands must continually evaluate the effectiveness of all efforts across multiple channels. There is a lot more pressure put on marketing today, and getting it right is not as easy as it may seem.
To better showcase what businesses must think about when planning out a funnel—and messages across that funnel that people might actually take a second to look at—there is an acronym that might help: SRRS. This stands for simple, relevant, repetitive and scannable.
Simple
It turns out that simple is actually quite difficult. Boiling down a message to the most intriguing, impactful sentence or phrase is what war rooms were made for. The message cannot be too long or too complex, or you will lose your audience.
Relevant
The messages we don’t notice are the ones that we don’t care about. The ones we aren’t looking for. The best marketers know their audiences so well that they figure out how to craft simple messages that the right eyeballs will not only see but connect with.
Repetitive
Think about messages you’ve seen over and over again until they are stuck in your mind. Nothing will stick unless you’ve seen it multiple times, in multiple places and probably in multiple formats. If you and your team get sick of hearing it, seeing it, looking at it, the message has probably only started to stick with your audience.
Scannable
This is where creativity comes into play. The message must be something that can be easily scanned and digested. The message should be easily understood and engaging, merging with your creativity to breathe life into it.
SRRS In Practice
One example of SRRS that sticks out in 2023 is the hype created around the new Barbie movie. Pink was all it took, and there wasn’t much more to it than employing the color and font to catch the eye of the intended audience. One billboard was solid pink. In the lower right-hand corner, in the Barbie font, was “July 21.” And that was it. This ad was intriguing, simple and caught the attention of the target audience (and then some, whether they liked it or not).
Simply put, bite-size messages and creative pieces, repeated in multiple channels, multiple times, is a back-to-basics marketing approach that works.
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