Marketing lessons are everywhere — usually, you just have to pay attention.  In this video, I tell a story about a Snapple machine and how that machine struck me as maligning a very fundamental marketing snafu.  It's a problem with Market To Message Match and it reminds me of some things that we should all be worried about in our own marketing.

[Transcript:]

One of the things about marketing is that it’s everywhere and there are marketing lessons that you can learn from the crazy stuff that people do.

For example, today I was on my way to get an ice water out of the machine in the snack bar at work. I’ve been on vacation and while I was gone they changed the machines around and there was a new giant Snapple machine right there with a giant Snapple logo on it. But the thing is, it doesn’t sell Snapple. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

There’s a picture of the Snapple machine above and you can see it sells Diet Coke, Sprite, and all this other stuff, but absolutely no Snapple.

As you can see, the marketing message that goes with this machine doesn’t match the product that the machine is delivering.

Do you have that problem in your business?

This is a really good example of marketing everywhere that you can see and learn from. Your marketing message needs to match the product that you’re delivering.

I’ll give you a really concrete example that’s rooted in SEO, it’s one of the things that we pay attention at the Rankings Institute, the course from Andrew Hansen that I’ve been telling you about.

When you have a listing in the search engines it’s one thing to be on the first page of Google – that’s great, you need to do that, it takes backlinks and all kinds of stuff that we’ve talked about.

Once you’re there you have to get people to click on your link. The way that you do that usually is by optimizing some compelling copy in the page title, which is the big bold line that shows up, and the description, which is the stuff that shows up underneath.

The thing is, the thing that you put in there that is going to entice the person to click has to match what you actually deliver. You don’t want to say that you have Snapple, have them click on it, and land on a Diet Coke page. That’s just not going to work.

That’s a market to message match issue. That’s going to cause a bounce rate.

You want to make sure that whatever expectation you’re setting in your page descriptions and your page titles, in terms of click through from SERPs for SEO, is actually matching the stuff that you’re delivering.

You want the stuff to be great, you want the stuff to be what you promised, and you want to over deliver and delight the person who is clicking through from Google. That’s going to drive your bounce rates down and help you with your subsequent conversions, whatever it is that you want that search engine visitor to do.

This is Mark Mason from Late Night Internet Marketing. I hope that helps you.