What motivates you to respond?

I believe, as a marketer, ultimately my job is to motivate people… motivate people to pay attention to our brand, motivate people to find out more about our product, motivate people to buy our product, motivate people to continue using our product, and the list goes on…

As a consumer, we only respond to marketing messages when we are motivated to do so. It can be a need, a want, an incentive, a negative reaction etc… The point is we only responded because there was a motivating factor in the message that caused us to take action. However, as marketers, we don’t always understand this concept. What makes you think the subject line on the eblast you just sent out will motivate someone to open the email? What makes you think someone is willing to follow your company’s Tweets? What makes you think someone will read the direct mail piece you just sent them?

It is obvious that as marketers,we don’t always ask ourselves these questions. If we did…. there would never be anything in our spam box, we will always be excited to receive junk mail (we wouldn’t even see it as junk mail), and “commercial free” programs wouldn’t be of any value to us.

The problem is most marketing messages lack a motivating factor. So before your next initiative, do yourself a favor and ask yourself if you would be motivated to respond to the what you are about to send out. You might save some time, effort and money by doing so.

Will V.