Before sitting down to develop your business’s next marketing campaign, stop a moment and spend some time to ensure that your message is an authentic one. People today are just so jaded; they simply don’t believe most marketing messages any more. Your message has to be relevant to their lives, show empathy for their situation, and come across as real — not fake — if you want to have a hope of connecting with your customers.

Understand Your Customers
The first thing you must do to develop an authentic marketing message is understand your customers. It is absolutely impossible to create a message that will really connect with prospects if you don’t understand what your potential customers are going through in their lives. This is not just a matter of reading through the survey reports that your marketing research team created. Let me be clear: I’m not knocking marketing surveys. They can be incredibly useful; they just aren’t enough. You have to be able to really understand your customers lives from their own point of view. This is qualitative stuff, not quantitative. For B2B marketers, this isn’t really difficult to do, assuming you can exercise a little empathy. Just open your Rolodex and treat a few of the customers in your target market to a cup of coffee (or a beer if that’s more appropriate). Ask them about their work—what are the joys and what are the headaches? Then just sit back and listen. It won’t take long for most people to really open up and share their lives with you. And after a few of these meetings, you should have a pretty good idea of what things are like for your customers.

Admittedly, if you’re a B2C marketer, working on a national CPG account, you can’t just call people in the target demographic and take them out for a beer. But the basic idea is the pretty much the same: organize some focus groups or individual interviews, ask people about their lives, and really listen.

(A little aside about focus groups here. Focus groups have been much maligned by most observers over the past few years. The term “focus group-tested” has even become short-hand for an inauthentic message. But that’s because focus groups have been used in the completely wrong way. Instead of bringing them in after a marketing message has been developed—or, worse yet, using them to do the heavy lifting of choosing new product lines and features—focus groups should only be used as a way to better understand the psychology of the target market. If you find yourself hoping that the focus group will agree with your preconceived ideas of where to take the marketing, you’re using them in the wrong way. Okay, off my soapbox.)

So what?
Okay, so you can now imagine yourself in the place of your customer and, from that vantage point, are able to understand her feelings, desires, and ideas. When crafting your message, here’s where you need to ask, “So what?”. How does your product or service address those feelings, desires, and ideas? Even when marketing is fun and colorful, people have little reason to care about it if it has no bearing on their lives. This is the downfall of so much Madison Avenue pizzazz. We all love the Super Bowl commercials, but too much of the time our favorites are little more than 30-second movies, after which we viewers have a hard time remembering what company the commercial was for. Why? Because, entertaining as the commercials are, they simply are not relevant to our lives.

Relevance is the extent to which your marketing message connects to your prospect’s interests, wants, and needs. Being relevant is more than entertaining someone, it’s about reaching deep down and speaking to that part of their hearts where their excitement is concentrated—the core, if you will, that represents something very significant to them. If you followed step one, you should know how your product or service can be valuable to your prospects. This should be the key to your message. Remember, it’s not what you want to communicate to the audience; it’s what they need to hear to find your company relevant.

Keep It Real
Now you’ve got the core of your marketing message. But there’s still one important step in the process. Your message won’t be considered authentic unless it come across as real to your audience. Too many companies will say anything to make a sale. This is so prevalent, that most consumers simply assume that your marketing is a lie. You need to show your sincerity if you hope to push past this inherent mistrust. So what does it mean to be real? There are a lot of definitions, but for marketing purposes, the key factors are knowing who you are and never over promising.

Knowing who you are means picking a brand and sticking to it. Figure out your company’s unique value proposition and stay focused on that. This means you can’t be all things to all people. You have to recognize that not all prospects are going to want what you’re selling. That’s okay. If you have a truly valuable product and can use these steps to outline an authentic marketing message, you will have enough customers. Stay true to your brand.

The second part is linked to the first: never over promise what your product or service can do. People are fairly realistic, and they know that a product won’t solve all of their problems overnight for free. Anyone who promises a product or service that can is going to be viewed as a snake oil salesman. Today’s consumers have had it drilled into their heads that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Be honest about your product’s benefits (and its limitations), and you’ll win converts to your brand. Moreover, I would always recommend under promising and over delivering, especially to service marketers. The resulting brand loyalty is a thing of beauty.

Conclusion
Authentic marketing is not easy. You can’t just push a button or buy some new software and hope that everything’s going to fall into place. You have to do the heavy lifting of getting to know your customers and always stay focused on helping them to achieve their goals. But helping people in this way is a sure-fire secret to putting your brand on a path to success. People are most loyal to the brands that matter to their lives.