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Journalism's 5W's Are Missing the
Most Important One You Need for Marketing
Most of us can recite the 5 W's: Who, What, When, Where and Why. Yet I had a journalism professor who taught the 6 W's: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.
 I know, "How" begins with an H. But it ends in a W! Get it? Get it? Of all the unemployed stand up comedians on the planet, I had to get one for a teacher.
Regardless of whether you were a journalism student, you probably learned the W's as a framework for writing something. We J majors were told to start with the 6 Ws, decide which one was most important, and that one goes first, in the lead. (Rhymes with deed, not dead.) From there you prioritize and cover all the other Ws in order of importance, with the important Ws first, the less interesting or important ones trickling down at the end. Hence the inverted pyramid model, meaning small pointy end facing down.
Why the inverted pyramid?
Because that way an editor could cut your story from the bottom up if cramped for space, plus the reader gets the good stuff quickly and doesn't have to finish reading if s/he doesn't feel like it. That's what they told us.
OK, that might work for journalism and writing press releases, and it still does, but it's a lousy way to go about marketing the voodoo you do and getting people to listen, buy and recommend you to others.
Put the pointy end up!
In the marketing world, the inverted pyramid should be right side up, not upside down. Why in the world would you want to craft a marketing message that encouraged or allowed people to lose interest or stop reading or paying attention to it?
Your goal is to expand their interest, go deeper and wider in building rapport and relationships that result in a sale or referral.
And that they are missing the single most important W-word of all when it comes to marketing and sales: WANT. All the W-words in the Marketing Message Pyramid that I teach and use are that one word--WANT. My 6 W's are want, want, want, want, want, want.
Let's face some facts.
People don't care about you or any of the Ws that describe you. What do people care about? Themselves. (I'll pretend that was an out loud answer on your part.) And it would be the right answer.
People don't wake up in the morning wishin' and a hopin' to hear a sales pitch, either. You don't. I don't. We don't want to be "marketed to," and we can spot a marketing, sales, advertising or elevator speech coming in three syllables or less.
We have built in radar, and when our radar goes off we duck and cover, hide out behind the wall of protection we've built around our personal and professional lives. Voice mail, caller id, spam filters, TIVO, receptionists, gatekeepers, lions, tigers and moats, oh my.
Translation tool for marketing.
Here's how you translate the descriptive all about you W's into the want and need words that will at least get people to peek over that wall: Connect before you convince.
Connect to what they care about (which isn't you), before you try so hard to convince. I didn't say connect instead of convincing. I said connect before you convince. Connect to what they want and need, connect to the benefits, and there's a higher likelihood you'll get your chance to convince later--when they lower that drawbridge and let you in.
Easy for me to say, I know. Here are two ways to connect:
- Show that you understand the world of your prospect.
- Bring your benefits to life. Not your credentials, your features, your history or heaven forbid-your patent pending proprietary process. Your benefits.
Features describe. They're all about you, your product or service. Benefits attract. They're all about them. Benefits are all about the wants or needs that you satisfy.
An example always helps.
I spoke to a self storage association on how to make their members' marketing stand out and get better results. (Yes, there is an association for everything). They tout "climate controlled units." That's a feature. What is the want or the need that is satisfied by having a climate controlled unit?
The answer depends on your target audience. "We have climate controlled units, Ms. Attorney Person, so that you can be in compliance with safe document storage." Or, "We have climate controlled units, Terri, so that your Aunt Edna's antique armoire will be protected from the severe Houston weather."
A not-so-hidden shortcut.
Did you catch the two-word shortcut I threw in there? If you're going to connect by bringing your benefits to life and showing you understand the prospect's world, you want to go beyond description and features. Those two words, "so that," will help you do it. "So that" links the feature to the benefit, to what people want, to what people care about, which is themselves, their wants and needs.
The idea here is to create as many want and need words as possible to fill and use in your right-side-up Marketing Message Pyramid. You'll use all those want and need words as building blocks when you talk about your business, write marketing material, web copy, conduct sales conversations, write proposals and even when you introduce yourself or answer the question, "What do you do?"
Listen up--literally.
If you'd like to know more ways to generate want and need words, and/or if you'd like to get the best tool I use to string them together in marketing and sales conversations, download my free 1-hour my teleseminar, "Help Them Hire You: How to Talk About Your Business So That People Listen, Buy and Recommend You to Others."
You can also learn more on that page (and below) about my upcoming 24-Hour Marketing Retreats, where we zero in, drill down and work together on the building blocks of your own Marketing Message Pyramid and other tools that will get you visible, energized and equipped to sell more products or services on a consistent, regular basis.
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