When you created your product or service, you likely had a target customer in mind. It could be a broad audience, or highly targeted. Either way, you have a desired set of customers that will purchase and use what you have to offer. Have you clearly relayed to them what value you offer them?

It happens all too often that the perception of a target market may be the opposite of what affect you wished to have on it.  With inbound marketing, the driving of traffic and converting it into leads and customers, you have the chance to be concise, clear and effective in your message, while affecting the bottom line, while increasing customer and client satisfaction. This happens with the product or service being found by the right target market and their perception being more qualified, or in line with your desired result. Both sides find success.

There are a few key differentiators from an effective message and an ineffective one:

1. Unclear value – Can the reader, viewer, listener understand the core value that your product or service offers?
2. Difficult to follow calls to action – Some calls to action are utterly miserable and are difficult to follow for the “end user”
3. Boring - Keep it lively. People interact better when the message being relayed to them isn’t dull and stiff, even if the subject is

By combining the natural desire you have to promote your brand in a vein of positive light, be authentic with the message and by using smart inbound marketing techniques your Internet marketing and social media marketing campaigns will have natural success.

(Photo credit: Sameer Vasta)

While reading through a plethora of blog posts in Google Reader earlier, I saw post after post of the same information, over and over.  Links to the same source of information bowing down to (unnamed) marketing writers gets old.

Don’t get me wrong, some information is worth spreading and can “go viral”, however, it happens all to often by aspiring, and also well accomplished blog authors that they repeat the same content.

While thinking about this I thought of cover bands. Its nice, sometimes, to go to a wedding or local downtown celebration event and hear some familiar songs by a cover band. You might even get lucky and make a request that the band knows! Rock on!  But tell me if I’m wrong, there is something about the original band getting up on the stage and ripping through an original song that they wrote, and that you’ve been listening to over and over on your favorite album. The intensity of knowing the audible sounds that are gracing your ears were created by the ones standing on the stage and performing.

This is similar with content. Content is such a vague term that it almost sounds cheesy and overused.  What I am referring to is the story you are telling, whether its written, in video form, or audio.

Get out there and tell a story, grab the microphone and rock it up, but try not to be like Adam Sandler in the Wedding Singer, at his lowest moment.

(I have to credit Drew Schug for inspiration for the title of this post during a conversation we had on Twitter on this topic)