Ep 191: 5 MUSTS for Effective Advertising

The 5 Musts for Effective Advertising

First thing, let’s point out the difference between marketing and advertising. Marketing is the entire selling process including product development and customer service. Advertising is one spoke of the marketing process.

Advertising today is your loudspeaker. There’s countless ways that you can advertise, including but not limited to radio, direct mail, tv, social, etcetera.

Curiously though, when I talk to businesses that are struggling and ask what their advertising budget is, they frequently react as if I’m asking for their social security number!

I just get that deer in the headlights look and they’re embarrassed because the amount is so low.

Let’s use a typical small business making a million dollars of revenue or less. If you’re not spending an amount of advertising dollars equal to one employee working full-time for you, then you’re not spinning nearly enough. That’s going to be somewhere between $35k and $75k most likely.

You’re not spending enough to generate buyers and become long-term customers.

At the end of the day you have a product or service that fills a need, a want, or solves a problem.  Now you have to market it and then you need advertising vehicles that make people you more familiar with your company and want to buy from you.

So you can have great products and or services but if you don’t have the advertising component they’re not going to find out about you. You don’t have that loud speaker.

BUT SEAN, WE’RE A WORD-OF-MOUTH BUSINESS!

No, you’re a pond. Why? A pond is a body of water that is not fed by any other body of water. It’s just full of mosquitos and snakes. Any fish in the pond have to be brought in. It’s not a vibrant body of water.

You need to create a conveyor-belt so you can take them of the life cycle of the customer relationship.

Thus, here are the 5 MUSTS for Effective Advertising

1. Find an Effective Advertising Vehicle that Works for You

Every business is different. TV works for one of my businesses but not for another. Digital Marketing works for one but not the  other, etc.

2. Must Know Your Target Market

You may have the correct vehicle for reaching your market but have creatives and copy that is unreliable to them. You need to know what your ideal customer looks like in terms of their desires, loves, fears and build your advertisement around addressing those.

3. Does the Cost of Advertising Make Sense?

I run a Super Bowl Ad.

But I couldn’t do that when I first started. I didn’t have the money for it. I also didn’t have the infrastructure in place at the time to handle the incoming calls and requests.

4. Great Messaging

Are you communicating a message that makes your customers interested in what you’re selling. Are you building credibility? Overcoming skepticism?

This varies across messaging tools. Radio ads are one minute long. TV ads are thirty-seconds. The messaging has to adapt to each vehicle, even if it’s for the same product or service.

5. Does it Move the Customer to Action?

Action is not always buying. Some marketing is just to make you feel good about the company. I recently saw one by Xfinity. It’s a great it’s heartwarming message. This is common around the holidays with big companies. They just want you to feel good about the company and they just want you to feel good about the company and will get your business another day. But that’s an action.

It could be to get you to buy immediately or maybe it pushes you to obtain more information about the company.

So, effective advertising will touch these five bases. If you want to grow your business in 2020, you better start advertising.