You speak with your mother differently than with your kids. You order a steak at Morton’s differently than a burger in the drive-thru. It’s context and agenda: right words, right place.

Same goes for your advertising: Contextual sensitivity in your advertising speaks a level of understanding beyond words: listen how customers are listening and speak to it.

Speak to everyone, no one hears you.

This came charging home this week while working on a series of ads for a new client. We’re advertising to commercial and residential customers. Within those, there’s repair, replacement, and new product sales. I’m creating six new ads that will replace ONE.

Over-stuffing is a common advertising blunder. Ads that were born focused become muddled by having one more thing after another weaseled into them. The fatter the message, the less muscle, the less impact.

Advertising works to the degree it answers the question of an engaged listeners mind. A homeowner wouldn’t ask about easy online ordering or job site delivery. A builder isn’t wondering about 24-hour repair response.

One question. One answer.  One size fits all sells no one.

One message, many angles of approach

Being heard is the responsibility of the speaker. To understand their listening, pay attention to where your customers are coming from: what matters to them, what are they trying to accomplish, where are they in the buying cycle. Communicating to specific listening determines if you’ll be heard.

While some customers want it Joe Friday fast: just the facts, others love to bond before trusting you with their money. Even others are simply ready to buy and don’t need to be sold. How well do you speak to each of them?

Wizard of Ads Partner Dave Young demonstrates the one message point clearly in a presentation he made to the Wyoming Governor’s Conference on Tourism:

Be a customer for a moment. Think about your last satisfactory buying experience. Did they listen first? Did they respond in a way that made you feel heard?

If you were in a hurry, they got you through quickly. If you wanted to linger and learn, they  demonstrated and discussed. They identified your listening and spoke to it. Good advertising works the same way.

Let’s play a game

Here’s a game you can play with advertising: next time you encounter an over-stuffed “attention everyone” ad, see how many different ads you could make from it. Better yet, share your answers here. I’m betting we can run up big numbers.

Radio use is declining. Newspaper circulation is in free-fall. Television ratings are collapsing. There is a common-thread to these three story lines. It’s not the internet. And, it carries a profitable lesson for you.

Shrinking audience share isn’t confined to traditional media. Yahoo! is shuttering its paid search to concentrate on display advertising and develop more and better content. Speculation by the internet cognoscenti points at this change as more evidence that Yahoo! will outsource its search functions to Microsoft’s Bing. But, that’s not the story that matters where you’re concerned.

Yahoo! bungled their early advantages by failing to generate sufficiently compelling content. As Google PacManned one user-driven experience after another, Yahoo! reacted by taking their eye off the content ball. The rest is a matter of journalism.

Compelling content is the missing ingredient in television, radio, and newspaper. It’s what Yahoo! is now scrambling to generate.

How compelling is your content?

Droning on about your company’s experience, your selection, your staff, your sales isn’t compelling. Content becomes compelling when it matters enough to become more interesting to your customer than what they’re already thinking about. All the search engine management you can buy won’t net conversion results if you don’t give visitors a meaningful payoff for their search.

Compelling content centers on your customer’s hopes, dreams, and felt-needs. Does yours?

Measure your content’s focus using the We-We Monitor from Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg‘s FutureNow, Inc.. Enter your URL and company name, click submit, and pucker up. The Customer Focus Calculator‘s results will point you in the right direction. What you do with this new awareness will determine what a Yahoo! blunder teaches you.

Was this helpful to you? I’d appreciate your feedback.

Running errands Saturday morning, I saw this scene unfolding in a bank parking lot. Morbid curiosity got the best of me and we pulled in to get a closer look.

Customer Appreciation Day

There was no signage explaining what was going on (or inviting people to participate). So, I had to get out of the car and ask the lone employee manning the folding table what was going on.

“It’s customer appreciation day, would you please sign in?” he told me with well scripted enthusiasm. Sign in? To be appreciated?

I don’t think so. There was one kid jumping incessantly, a guy waiting to do chair massages, and a pop-up tent way on the other side of the parking lot with cold drinks, popcorn and  lots of brochures about bank services–more chances to be appreciated, no doubt.

Appreciating customers is wise business practice. Doing it in a hot parking lot, disconnected from your branding message is beyond lame. It is, as my kids say, FAIL.

Appreciation is a practice, not an event

Customer appreciation isn’t something you do, it’s the way you are. How quickly do you respond? Do you get it right the first time? Are customer expectations exceeded, or merely satisfied?

This is a pass-fail test and your customer grades your work. Having to tell customers you appreciate them probably means you don’t understand what appreciation looks like to them. Tune into the customer’s felt need. Go beyond satisfaction regularly. Being thankful is so much better than just saying it.

A moonwalk in a bank parking lot doesn’t enrich my experience of the bank; there’s no benefit. They might as well have rented an inflatable pink gorilla instead and put it on the roof with a sign reading, “we want you to think we appreciate you.”

Everyday is customer appreciation day. Lose a few and you’ll find them even easier to appreciate.