You have to answer many questions before you can create marketing that resonates with people and gets them to take action. My favorite, though, is “Why should they care?”

For any B2B business, your target customers care about two things: Making more money, and alleviating pain.

You ought to be able to do one or both of those for every customer you work with. But how do you make them care about your solution?

Highlight what’s standing in the way.

At Text Request, for example, we avoid saying things like “We have a great product for texting. Want to see how it works?” Instead we pitch ideas like, “You’re spending a ton on lead generation, but most of your prospects are falling through the cracks. Want some help fixing that?”

Customers suddenly care because we spend most of our time talking about them.

Why should customers care about what you have to offer? They shouldn’t. They should care about improving their situation. So talk about their situation, and highlight whatever is standing in the way of them improving it.

Once they’re focused on what’s in the way, come in with “I can get rid of that for you. It’ll only cost $XYZ, and then you can get everything you want. Sound good?”

Now apply that to your ads, emails, and web copy, and you’ll start seeing improvements.