One of the most common mistakes that people make when starting a new business is not planning a good marketing strategy from the beginning. It is easy to get caught up in the product or idea and think that you can plan the marketing strategy once the product or service is developed. The best way to market your business is to incorporate your strategy into the initial planning phase. If you don’t know how to market a new business, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is an excellent place to start.
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What Is Monroe’s Motivated Sequence?
Alan H. Monroe was a professor at Purdue University who specialized in the psychology of persuasion. His focus was on persuasion in public speaking, but his time-tested strategy for motivating people became a standard technique for sales and marketing, too. As you are planning ways to market your business, this five-step strategy can be used in everything, including blogs, email marketing campaigns, and at any other touchpoint. Monroe’s Motivated Sequence calls for the following:
- Get your audience’s attention
- Establish a need
- Explain how you can satisfy the need (solve the problem)
- Establish a future vision of success
- Present a call-to-action (the pitch)
Ready to learn how to use Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to market and grow your business? Here is a summary of Monroe’s steps:
1. Get Their Attention
This is the first step to any advertising campaign. You must connect with your audience and find something that will grab their attention. Hopefully, you have done your homework and already know your target market intimately. This can help you find a way to connect. Some common strategies can include humor, storytelling, asking a question, or using a shocking piece of information.
2. Establish a Need
Now that you have their attention, you need to connect with them and establish a common need. This is crucial when planning how to market a new business. You can use facts, examples, and illustrations to make your point. Another technique is to present the potential consequences of inaction. The more they feel that they have something in common with you, the easier it will be to convince them of this need.
3. Satisfy the Need
Now, you are ready to establish how your product or service can solve the problem or satisfy the need. You can back up your claims with facts, a position statement, or demonstrations of the solution. At this point, it is a good idea to address any counterarguments or concerns that the audience might have. The main concern is that you establish a clear connection between the problem and the solution that you are proposing.
4. Establish a Future Vision
Now, it is time to paint a picture for your audience. You need to help the audience visualize what their future will look like if they do not take action. The first rule in this step is to make it real and to make it believable. At this point, you are only trying to establish agreement with you. If you are doing a blog or website, try to paint a picture that is not time-bound and that is evergreen content so that your message will remain relevant in the future.
5. Call-to-Action
This is the most important step, and surprisingly, the one that many beginning marketers leave off when working on how to market a new business. If you do not give your audience clear instructions for what you want them to do, then they will not take action. You cannot assume that they will get what you mean and draw the conclusion themselves. Some might do this, but for most, making a formal request is the only way to get the job done.
How to Market a New Business with Monroe’s Motivated Sequence
Monroe’s five steps take a straight-forward approach for how to market a new business, and they are a simple formula that will work for marketing any new or established business of any kind. It is worth noting that establishing your brand should come before marketing. Before you begin any of these steps, you need to know your market, know their needs, and have your brand image and strategy in place. Once you have these basics down, it is a matter of applying Monroe’s five steps to develop your plan.
It is worth noting that these five steps can be applied on the macro level and the micro-level of your business plan. They can be used to develop the overall strategy, and they can be applied to every piece of content that you develop. Monroe’s strategies can be used as a checklist to make sure that every time you make contact with your audience, they are likely to take action. This can be applied to every blog that you write, every email that you send out, every newsletter, or social media posts.
You should treat every contact point as if it is the only contact point that a person will ever have with your business. That means that every piece of advertising media must count. One tip is to have your endpoint in mind when you begin developing the piece. Know what you want your reader, viewer, or listener to do at the end of the piece, and then build up to it.
Now that you understand Monroe’s steps for success and how to market a new business, the next thing that you need to do is to take a look at your current marketing strategy and ask if it follows each of these steps. If it does not, then it is time to roll up your sleeves because you have work to do.
If you are just getting started or thinking about a new business endeavor, these steps will help you to have the greatest chances for success from the beginning. Monroe’s strategies are a simple process that can be applied by businesses of any size or type (including a family business), and they are among the most recognized methods for achieving assured success that we have today. Before you go any further in your business development, it is time to ask yourself if your strategy follows this success formula.
