In one of my former careers I owned a Marketing & Advertising agency. Recently people have asked me how to be more effective with their marketing so I have decided to re-post many of my earlier newsletters and articles on this blog. Today’s article is on the Marketing Equation.

The Marketing Equation has four main components. They are first, Interrupt. This simply is the process of getting qualified prospects to pay attention to your marketing. Simple enough to say, I understand, but a lot more difficult to pull off in real life unless you understand hot buttons in marketing – we will cover that later.

The second component is Engage. Once the prospect is interrupted, it’s critical to give the reader the promise that information is forthcoming that will help him make the best decision possible, or in other words, help facilitate his decision-making process.

The third component is Educate. Once you’ve interrupted and engaged the prospect, you have to give information that allows him to logically understand how and why you solve the problem. This is accomplished by giving detailed, quantifiable, specific Inside Reality revealing information. This turns the corner from an emotional sale. You interrupted and engaged him based on emotional Hot Buttons to a logical sale. This is easy to do if you just follow the Marketing Equation.

The fourth component of the Marketing Equation is the Offer. Now that the prospect’s been interrupted based on problems that are important to him, been engaged by the promise of a solution, and examine the educational information that makes your solution real and believable, the last step for you is to give the prospect a low risk way to take the next step in the sales process. This is done by offering a free marketing tool, such as a report, brochure, seminar, audio, video, sample, or something to educate him further – You want to allow the prospect to feel like he/she is in control of the final decision. The offer should not be used to make a sale – it should be used to capture the name, email and phone number of a prospect so that you can put it in your database and continue to educate over time.

Remember that it takes an average of seven to nine exposures before John or Jane Smith will take action to buy. We will talk about “drip systems” / “contact management systems” in another post.

As you can see, this Marketing Equation follows the formula for what marketing is supposed to do in the first place. In fact, at this point with the brief exposure that you’ve had to the Marketing Equation, we can simply say that marketing’s job is to Interrupt, Engage, Educate, and Offer. It’s really simple to understand and a high percentage of you reading this are probably saying, “Of course! That makes sense,” and possibly even thinking that you already do that. I suspect you may be doing a lot of it, but not all of it.

Just remember that like math where 2 + 2 is always 4, and 3 x 2 is always 6, the marketing equation (Interrupt + Engage + Educate + Offer) will bring consistent results to your advertising. In future articles I will be including examples of how to make it work.

This link will give you a tool to grade your own marketing materials and take some of the subjectivity out of the decision making process: Marketing Evaluation Tool