5 Strategies to Create Sticky Marketing Messages from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
Does this sound familiar? You put so much effort into your marketing, but it’s not returning the results you want. If so, you’re not alone. Finding marketing messages that stick and compel people to take action is difficult. While there’s no magic formula to make your marketing work (anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you), there are principles that you can follow to enhance the impact of your marketing content.
A great start to learning those principles comes from Made to Stick by Chip Heath, a Stanford professor, and his brother Dan Heath, a Duke Senior Fellow. While their academic credentials might suggest a dry, academic book, they have taken their own wisdom to heart and written a straightforward, entertaining guide to creating sticky content.
5 Strategies to Create Sticky Marketing Messages
1. Keep it simple
As a business owner, there lots of reasons why you think your product or service is great. When you market to potential customers, you want to tell them every possible benefit they could enjoy. It makes perfect sense – the more benefits, the more likely they are to buy.
In fact, this isn’t true at all. Potential customers are not interested in listening to a laundry list of all the great things about your business. Their attention span is short, and their patience is limited. You must find the core benefit that will attract people and focus on that. Keep it simple. Identify the top benefit and explain how it will make their lives better and leave it at that.
2. Surprise people
A great way to get people's attention is to surprise them. And a particularly effective way to do this is to present something that seems familiar and put a twist on it.
My favorite example of this is the Silverado Truck commercial that shows a man with his cat doing everything you would expect a dog to do— hunting, fishing, playing fetch, wrangling cows, and diving off a dock. By replacing the standard dog-and-truck commercial with a cat-and-truck commercial, you immediately grab the audience’s attention. And not only do they stay engaged throughout the ad, but they also remember it.
This play on the familiar makes people wonder what is happening and what will happen next. They become an active participant in the content, making the experience more enjoyable and memorable.
3. Make the message concrete
They say pictures are worth a thousand words, and it’s true because they help us imagine something that is concrete in the world. If you want people to remember your message, you need to find a way to evoke their senses. Whether that's a visual experience, or what they will hear, taste, touch, or smell - the more they can imagine the outcome of using your product or service the more likely they are to remember your messaging and be compelled to action.
4. Create credibility
Credibility makes your messaging more convincing, and people are more likely to pay attention. You can create your own credibility by demonstrating that you’re a subject matter expert, but it takes time for you to build that reputation. Getting endorsements or support from other subject matter experts can be a great way to get quick credibility, though depending on the expert, this may require some serious funding.
The easiest way to demonstrate credibility is to get testimonials and success stories from your customers. More than anyone, your customers know the value of your product and have no outside motivation to exaggerate the quality or lie about their experience. Their personal experience will likely have a greater impact on potential customers’ buying decisions than an endorsement from an expert who hasn’t actually used your product.
5. Evoke Emotions
To get people to act, you need to make them care; they need to feel something. Emotions are an essential driver of action.
When you are trying to sell your product or service to someone, the focus of your copy should be on your customer and the good feelings they will have as a result of using your product. For example, if you were selling a chef’s knife to home cooks, you shouldn’t focus on things like the weight of the knife and the type of metal used in the blade. This creates no emotions. Instead, you might show them a person is their home kitchen, breezing through chopping vegetables and then cutting a beautiful roast at the dinner table surrounded by friends and family. Home cooks don’t want a new knife because of its features. They want the knife because it will allow them to share the joy of a delicious meal with friends and family.
Another way to tap into people’s emotions is to focus on their identity. Think of the most recent Apple ad that you’ve seen. It didn’t list the specs of a computer or phone. It probably showed people dancing or being creative and edgy. By doing this Apple taps into people’s identity and shows them something they want to be a part of, something that speaks to how they see themselves in the world (even if they will never dance down the street with their phone or use the high end creative suite on their computer).
Small Business Book Review: Made to Stick
Made to Stick isn’t the first marketing book you should read, but it as a great addition to any marketing education. This book will help you understand what types of content will truly speak to your customers and create a memorable experience. The book is full of examples of campaigns that have worked and those that have fallen flat, making their explanations clear and actionable.
I give Made to Stick a 4 out 5 stars for small business owners. Start your learning with books like the 1-Page Marketing Plan or Marketing Made Simple, but when you’re ready to dive deeper, Made to Stick is a must read.
