Author: Patty Cisco, Creative Catalyst, August 18, 2010

The senior health care market is a very competitive market, and many leaders feel like their marketing message is getting lost. What can you do to ensure that you have an excellent marketing message?

The best exercise I have found that is really simple and will help you nail down an exceptional marketing message, was shared by Karl Bryan. An exceptional marketing message will always cover these three areas:

1) A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – this essentially explains your positioning over the other senior care providers in your market place and summarizes your services’ primary benefits.

2) A compelling offer to take IMMEDIATE action.

3) An easy answer to the question your prospects ask prior to doing business with you: “Why should I do business with you over the other options available to me?”

A powerful way of developing a marketing message is to do it through a process called story boarding. Place five boxes across the page, left to right. And place these topics in them:

1) Target Market – Analyze your five best customers in terms of demographics and document them individually in the first box. If you do not have clients yet, use the best guess you can in terms of what future clients will look like.

2) Problems – Identify “problems” your target market experiences.

3) Solutions – Identify solutions for the problems. This is a powerful step and essentially what you are doing here is solving the problem your prospects are experiencing or anticipate they may experience.

4) Demonstrate Results – When developing your marketing message try to come up with a way to make it “quantifiable.”

5) Different – Explain what makes you different. Write individual words and short phrases in the last box to explain how you stand out from the crowd.

Once you have these words and phrases for each box filled out go through and write down the five most important answers from your prospective client’s eyes.

If you are not sure what that order might be…simply phone some of your families, residents, clients etc, and ask them directly. Marketing is nothing more than “asking people what they want, and then delivering it”.

Now that you have done this process, compare it to how your competitors are positioning themselves and use elements that will enable you to stand out from those you compete against. An exceptional marketing message does not come easy. You need to uncover the true essence of your service that sets you apart, and then communicate it in a clear and concise way.

If you’d like to use this article in your own newsletter or on your web site, you are welcome to reprint it in its entirety with an active link to our web site and the following author info:

“By Patty Cisco, Creative Catalyst for CISCO & CO. For effective marketing, sales and customer strategies that connect you with your customers visit www.ciscoco.com.”