Shaping a compelling core message for your digital marketing campaigns
I am interested in the Digital Economy and the effects of digitization on everyday life, businesses and society. I am also interested in application of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy in Digital Transformation in particular Automation, Use of AI and Big Data in Research and Innovation, Enterprise & Business Engagement and in learning and teaching in HE.
My research is centred on application of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy and his theory of modal aspects1 in real-life situations, especially to clarify and understand complex situations, where digital technologies such as AI and Big Data are involved in Human context, without reductionism, and to guide practice by the normative content of the aspects. Dooyeweerd is a relatively new thinker, and I am at the leading edge of exploring the application of his ideas
During a Knowledge Exchange Internship project with one of the SMEs based in Stockton, North East of UK, we had a task to develop a core message for digital marketing campaigns. The service offering we were marketing, however, was not easy. It was a niche software product. Its aim was to protect employers from something they did not know they needed protecting from. This was the dangers of employees driving for work and the software would help them fulfil their duty of care. We needed to turn the dull image of duty of and care and health and safety into an exciting product a company really believe in and desired.
We needed to get the core message absolutely nailed so that when users land on the Company’s website, it is compelling enough for them to complete our call to action, which was our free risk report. The core message needed to tell the prospect what the problem is and how our software would solve this issue in a succinct and compelling way. The challenge of marketing this product is that many people do not know that their company needs protecting in the first place and they are not aware of the dangers of employees driving for work.
We started by copywriting journey by finding what our product does and researching other existing companies that offer this kind of solution. However, we soon realised they were only using terms within the fleet industry, such as ‘grey fleet’ which describes employees own cars that are used for work-related journeys. Rephrasing the industry term for employees driving their own cars was something that we thought was necessary because people were not searching for this term on google and we needed to use a universal term that everyone would understand. After writing many terms down, We nailed it down to a few and picked ‘on the go.’ This new phrase explained exactly what the employee is doing when driving and users could use our software ‘on the go’ too.
We brainstormed various ideas and wrote pieces of copy we thought would compel the readers. We finally came up with a message such as ‘protection you deserve’ and ‘software for businesses on the go.’ We believed ‘protection you deserve’ would give the user a feeling of entitlement and self-worth so they would buy this product.
However, we made a classic marketing mistake, forgot what someone with no prior knowledge of this issue would think of the product, and lost sight of our target market. The message was too abstract and confusing. Protection from what? Why do we deserve this product? Our first message did not really explain this.
After brainstorming around 70 ideas, we condensed it down to five. However, we still were not quite there. One idea was instead of laying out the messages as landing pages; we write them out as paragraphs so we can see that the messages make sense. We researched what language our target audience of HR professionals uses. We read HR magazines, blogs and ask HR people we knew for feedback and discovered what we needed to say. But how to make sure our message is compelling and makes sense to our everyday life?
We believed Dooyeweerd’s Aspects could help!
Dooyeweerd was a philosopher who introduced fifteen aspects of everyday life. Aspects are distinct ways in which reality exists, has meaning, is experienced, and occurs. Aspects helped us to understand human’s desires and emotions more so that our core message would appeal to these aspects and would affect a deeper level. We decided that the main aspects our message needed were to appeal to money, fear and people. So we picked economic, pistic (a Greek word for faith) and social from Dooyeweerd suit of aspects to develop the core message further. Dooyeweerd helped us to decide for changing words. For example, we changed the word ‘risk report’ to ‘safety insight.’ We used the words ‘free’ and ‘reveal’ to make it sound more exciting. We asked for feedback from my family and colleagues on what message would compel them the most. Most preferred the positive message of ‘safety insight.’
Writing down the pain points of our target audience was extremely important, for example, we discovered our product would save people time, money and would protect their business. Suddenly, everything was coming together. This final core message was succinct and told the user exactly what the product does. It is genuine and honest. It would appeal to our target market of HR professionals.HR people do not want marketing jargon; they wanted something that makes sense straight away.
We started with a question to capture the write target audience; we only wanted users who have employees who drive their own car for work. We told them exactly what their duty of care was to educate them about what they needed to do. Next, we used the term ‘safety net’ to show we are protecting them from ‘the biggest danger at work’. This would bring up feelings of fear but a positive message that we are there to help them from this threat. We sued terms such as ‘find out if you’re exposed’ as this would make the user curious. Finally, we wanted to show them what ‘we’ll take from here,’ because we will do the checks for them and protect them.
If you are interested to hear more about this project and process of shaping a compelling message using Dooyeweerd’s aspects. Please email Dr Sina Joneidy @ s.joneidy@tees.ac.uk
