Believe it or not, everything you think you know about marketing is wrong. That’s right, flat out wrong.
Fortunately, it’s not really your fault. You see, what we today think of as marketing is something that’s been in the works for the past 1/2 century or so. It hasn’t always been this way, but because of the slow hijacking of the idea of what marketing really is, what we now think of as marketing is really nothing more than an attempt to build up name recognition.
Turn on the TV, flip through any magazine, open up most any telephone directory in any city, or drive along any major highway and you’ll see a never ending parade of attempts to simply brand a company. Or in other words, these companies are paying big bucks with the hope that when the time comes for you to buy a product or service they happen to offer that you’ll remember having seen their ad somewhere and decide to spend money with them.
As a small business, investing your hard earned dollars on the simple HOPE that someone remembers you at some time in the future is in my opinion, suicide!
So, if branding is such a bad idea, then how should you market your business?
Well, if we go back to the early days of selling and even up until the mid-1920’s and examine the type of marketing that was being used we’d see that it was all very much about telling a story and building a relationship.
Instead of simply trying to get someone to remember them, companies would paint a picture of life with their product or service in it. They’d go into as much detail as possible about why their product was better than the competition.
Unfortunately, over time as it became more costly to advertise companies started focusing more on branding instead of telling a story, painting a picture, and explaining exactly why someone should purchase their product or service.
In my next post I’ll share with you some videos that show clear cut evidence of how the focus of marketing has changed over the years. It’s a pretty eye-opening piece of evidence and I think you’ll find it interesting.
There are a lot of things that you as a business owner that provides products or services to a limited geographic or local area you can do to try and grab people’s attention and get them to pick up the phone or visit your storefront.
There is of course all of the traditional media like TV, radio, newspaper, and direct mail that are available to you. There are the many online tools and resources like SEO, PPC, email marketing, banner ads, social media, and various other methods as well.
But no matter how you decide to market your business, if you’re missing this one critical ingredient your marketing efforts will fall flat and you won’t generate the type of response you need in order to continue growing your business.
What’s this one ‘critical’ ingredient?
It’s a killer offer. You see, when you invest your money marketing your business, if you don’t have something to motivate your prospects to actually get off their rear and either pick up the phone, log onto your website, or stop by your shop, all you’re really doing is spending money on branding, and at the end of the day it’s not a very effective way to grow your business today.
Yes, having a solid, well-recognized brand is an important element to growing a successful local business. However, paying money to do anything other than generate customer RIGHT now is a deadly mistake that should be avoided at all costs.
So, what makes for a killer offer and why is it so important?
A killer offer is essentially the bait that gets your target market to identify themselves as interested and/or qualified in the product or service you offer. It’s the carrot you dangle in front of the horse so they’ll come to you.
What should you offer?
Unfortunately, that ones a little tougher to figure out because there’s really no one answer that applies to every business. The killer offer for a dentist will be very different from the home theater installer will be very different from the lawn care contractor.
The key to figuring out what to offer starts with knowing your target market and understanding what it is they’re really trying to achieve. What is it that keeps them up at night? What is it they really, REALLY want?
Once you have an answer to that question, put together a product or service that solves their problem and you have yourself a powerful offer that will generate interested, qualified prospects.
Now, chances are it’ll take a few times to really figure out what to offer your target market. Again, there’s no silver bullet that works for everyone or for every business so you’ll need to spend some time working on your solution.
However, once you come up with an offer that is powerfully motivating for YOUR prospects and customers, you’ll solve 75% of your marketing problems and your business will start to grow like crazy.
Already have what you think is a great offer?
Share it with us in the comments section. Tell us who your prospect is and what you’ve found to be extremely effective in getting them to take action.
I’ve recently completed a draft of a one page flyer for a marketing client of mine. As is usually the case whenever I create a marketing piece, the amount of text far outweighed amount of pictures by a fairly wide margin.
Very shortly after sending the draft to my client to review, I got the following response, something I’ve actually come to expect from new clients:
“Dude! No one will ever read that. It looks like spam at first glance. Needs to be 90% pictures and 10% text and the text needs to be one or two sentences per caption.”
So, why is that I’ve come to expect this response and why do I insist on including so much copy in my marketing materials?
There’s actually a couple of reasons.
First, most people think marketing needs to be all pictures, logos, or slogans that build a ‘brand’. In fact, 99% of all marketing we see is simply trying to build a company’s brand.
They want us to think of their product or service whenever we have a need that they happen to fulfill so they buy up as much ad space as they can afford to and plaster their company logo or slogan all over, hoping to burn them into your brains.
Sadly, the results are very rarely what any self-respecting marketer is hoping to achieve.
Another reason I’ve come to expect this reaction is because long copy sales materials are very much out of the norm. Again, because most people are used to seeing the one photo with a catchy slogan, or the company name and then a menu of products or services being offered, anytime they see lots of words, it shocks their brain because it’s so unusual.
Well, truth be told, if you’ve written the copy and targeted your market correctly, people will actually read what you’ve written.
Finally, I insist on including lots of copy in my marketing materials because people are starving for quality information to help them make a decision. Especially if it’s a high dollar decision they’re making!
You see, human nature states that we want to make the BEST buying decision possible. Unfortunately, there’s a severe shortage of quality information available to help us make our decisions so in most cases we end up deciding based on price because that’s really the only differentiating factor we have.
Flat out, that’s a HORRIBLE place to be.
When you give your target market the information they need to make a good buying decision, you not only position yourself as ‘The Expert’, but you always convey some goodwill, which in turn motivates your prospect to want to do business with you.
So, as you’re creating your marketing materials, don’t be afraid of a lot of text! Look at your printed marketing materials as tiny little salesmen that you’re sending out to deliver your complete sales message and story.
Do you honestly think you could do that effectively if you include 90% pictures and only 10% text?
Last time I talked about effective marketing secret #2, which is the idea that branding is NOT marketing. Again, it’s incredibly important to develop your ‘brand’, but as a small business, investing money simply to develop name recognition is quite possibly the BIGGEST mistake you could make.
So that being said, what should you do as a business owner to generate leads, convert customers, and ultimately grow your business to where you want it to be?
The answer lies in effective marketing secret #3, understanding that direct response marketing is, hands down, THE BEST way to market your business.
Now, not everyone’s clear on what the term ‘direct response marketing’ means so I’ll share with you my definition. Direct response marketing is a type of marketing that is very targeted in that you’re only reaching out to a highly targeted group of prospects. Also, everything you do with direct response marketing had a very specific action you’d like your prospects or customers to take.
An example of direct response marketing would be when you send out a postcard to a highly targeted group of prospects offering a free consumer guide and to get this guide they would need to visit a website and complete a form.
This is very effective and incredibly powerful way to market your business for a couple of reasons:
First, because you can tell right away if something is working or not. If you have a good enough percentage of prospects logging onto your website and completing the form, then you know you’ve done a good job.
If they don’t hit your website, then you know your postcard wasn’t strong enough. If they hit your website, but don’t opt-in as expected, then you know your offer wasn’t strong enough. Of course that’s simplifying it just a tad, but hopefully you get the picture.
Second, with direct response marketing you’re only spending money on things you know will reach prospects you’ve identified as being interested and qualified to buy the products or services you offer.
I guess some would argue that branding reaches your target audience directly as well, and that may be true, but the important difference lies in what’s being said. Again, branding is simply focused on developing name recognition while direct response marketing is focused on immediate results and sales.
The third benefit of direct response marketing is that it’s scalable. If you send out this postcard and it works, wouldn’t you want to send more of them out? And on the flip side, if it’s a complete flop don’t you think you’d want to bag the campaign all together? Or at the very least go back and try to improve it.
In any case, direct response marketing gives you the ability to control very tightly the amount you spend on your marketing campaigns. So if you only have $150 to do some marketing with, you could spend $150. Once you generate some sales with the $150, you would hopefully then turn around and invest some of your returns in more marketing, and so on and so forth.
So as you look for was to grow your business in this difficult environment, take a good hard look at incorporating direct response marketing into your marketing plans because there’s no other form of marketing that will give you the bang for your proverbial buck.
