Paying is to engage your target audience in a dialogue and engagement is the key word here. For any dialogue to be effective, marketers need to stop yelling at b2b prospects with by now, messages of Fortune 500 software company was frustrated because of its 50% off promotion was failing to drive sales. They decided to survey customers and prospects to find out why the response was overwhelming. customers and prospects felt a growing distance between their needs and the sales objectives of the software vendor. In fact, as the software vendor gained market dominance, customers felt that the vendor cared less and less about them. The software vendor had made no attempt to understand the evolving needs of their customers.

The 50% off offer was interpreted as a bullying tactic. In messaging terms, the software vendor had jumped immediately to the sales message by now They failed to engage their target persona in a relevant meaningful dialogue. This is a common mistake and a missed opportunity. Instead, marketers first need to establish relevancy with their target persona, you need to earn the right to sell to them. And you do this in engaging in a dialogue. The engagement message is the first of four key messages that make up the message box.

In practical terms, it's the hook or the grabber. And the content here is very important. The message and language you use is not about you. You do not introduce your product here. Instead, you need to ground yourself in the issues and needs of your persona. What issue of theirs can you use to get their attention?

And of course, this can't be any random issues. It needs to be an issue you can help solve. We can craft this message is either a statement or a question. It does Doesn't matter. What does matter is that we speak the personas language. How do they describe their problem, opportunity or interest?

We need to use the same words and engage them by painting a picture of an issue they care about when that we can solve, although they don't know that yet. The engagement message is all about them, not you. Your company name does not appear in the engagement message, you do not introduce your product. You do not tell the prospect how great you are. That comes later. If you aren't sure where to start, go back and review the persona you just created.

There will be plenty of clues in your persona to help you shape your engagement message. Look for the personas problem, issue, goal or opportunity. Try to understand their values and fears. This information will help you shape your engagement message. Let's look at a few examples. Although this is a b2c example, I've encountered it because it's very easy to understand.

Remember when Amazon first began its business model. This was their engagement message. Books cost too much. That's it. It's simple. And it's a bold statement that consumers could understand.

They went on Add a few additional details. The price of books has gone up 30% in five years, prices are so high that people buy fewer books that they want. Are you hooked? a statement like this draws you into the conversation you were tempted to respond to? Yes, that's so true. As the audience leans in, Amazon is ready to continue their messaging.

Notice that the company name Amazon and even the type of company Amazon is does not show up in the engagement message. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We're only focusing on the engagement message of your message box. Here's one more example. Fly right is a remedy for jet lag. Again, I included Even though it is a business to consumer example, because it's easy to understand, fly right is a product made by an entrepreneur well familiar with his market.

Based in Silicon Valley, one of his personas was the frequent flyer business executive who travels more than 50,000 miles per year. This was his engagement message. Air travel is exhausting and takes a toll on your productivity. You're always on the goal. Go and can't afford not to be at 100% especially when your meetings begin as soon as you land. Notice that the message is all about the personas problem or issue, which by the way, was captured in detail in fly writes persona.

Also notice that the name of the product or even the type of product is not even mentioned in this engagement message. Okay, here's a b2b example. This engagement message comes from a contact center technology company. They make the software into tools used by many call centers. Their engagement message was the following. online retailers are missing revenue opportunities on their websites, and they don't even know it.

Prospects are visiting your website all the time, but you don't have the ability to recognize and separate the qualified leads from the random visitors in real time. Now, this is a pretty bold statement, online retailers are missing revenue opportunities, and they don't even know it. In fact, I might go so far as to say that it might be like poking a stick at asleeping there. And you know what? That's okay. We do not require the persona to agree with our engagement message.

Our goal is to engage them in a conversation. So if the persona says, You know what, I think you're right, or if the persona responds, hey, this isn't my problem. We've got this already figured out. We've achieved our goal because we've generated a response. The response whether agreement or disagreement is an invitation for us to find out out more about why the persona responded the way they did. That's an invitation for us to continue the conversation, as we'll see as we complete the message box exercise.

The last b2b example comes from a social media monitoring company. Their engagement message was the following. Listening to and comprehending customer feedback takes too much time. It's hard because customers are leaving a huge volume of feedback in variety of places. There is just too much information to sift through to make sense of it all. This engagement message jumped off the page of their persona template.

This message acknowledges a fear that many customer support managers face and in so doing, it creates a connection of relevance between the vendor and the customer. We've shown that we get it we understand the Herculean task our persona faces. This gives us credibility to engage them in further conversation. The hardest thing about the message box is getting the engagement message right. Once the engagement message is clear and concise, the other messages will almost write themselves. But if the engagement message is wrong, then none of the messages that follow will make any sense.