Posts Tagged Advertising
Posted on April 30, 2010 by Bill Hansen
Ad avoidance is a major problem for anyone in the marketing field. We buy, schedule, and target our media under the assumption that it’s going to get noticed. But often it does not. 60-70% of television ads can now be bypassed by DVR. Only 1/2% to 2% of direct mail is opened. According to scientific studies, over 80% of internet ad units are purposefully avoided.
Radio, on the other hand, is only ignored about 8% of the time*, but that’s not what this is about. This post is about making simple changes to your advertising or marketing approach to vastly increase the likelihood that your audience actually pays attention to your message.
Yes, consumers will pay attention to ads. Many do today, even with the tools that they have to easily avoid them. But only the ads that speak to them, and that’s the key – the ad actually has to make the consumer think that it’s about them, not just the company that’s advertising. Here are four basic things (and one advanced technique) that you can use immediately to improve your connection with, and therefore your engagement to, your target audience.
Posted on April 21, 2010 by Bill Hansen
Odds are that you or one of your key staff excels at sales; Few businesses survive long, no matter how great their product, pricing, or service, without at least one strong rainmaker on the roster. If you could clone your Rainmaker several times — effectively doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your Rainmaking expertise — you’d probably be able to grow significantly. The problem, however, is this can be costly and sometimes it’s just impractical. Due to the specialization/experience required, training, the inevitable ramp-up phase, and the fact that many new hires don’t work out, sales is very difficult for most small businesses to expand and profitably grow to a meaningful scale.
Enter advertising, the tool that many businesses turn to increase revenue at a meaningful and profitable level. Advertising, when done right, is simply Mass-Selling. When it does the exact same things that a good Rainmaker does, advertising can actually ‘sell’ to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of prospective customers at once.
Many businesses that advertise (or used to) might argue that this is idealistic at best and wrong-headed at worst. They’ve tried advertising and it doesn’t deliver (at least to the scale that they’d expected). Having seen hundreds of small businesses experience significant growth through advertising, I’d argue that many of these unimpressed businesses simply don’t advertise the right way. If they’d thought of their advertising as mass-salesmanship, and actually applied the principles of strong one-on-one selling, they could have experienced much different results…
Posted on April 18, 2010 by Bill Hansen
Ever heard the expression “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”?
How about “People buy from people that they like”?
These two ideas represent polar opposites of marketing strategies used today by many small and mid-sized businesses.
The IBM quote reflects the idea that a ‘big business image’ will make prospects more comfortable buying from you. This thinking leads to lots of letterhead, a shiny facade, and a highly ‘professionalized’ image. It also leads many companies to try to look like they think people think they should look. Sometimes this strategy works. But often, it creates an impersonal, sterile, and generic brand identity. Just the opposite of what makes people take notice of and appreciate a business.
On the other extreme is a simple formula for success: “be liked!” In today’s business environment, where authenticity and uniqueness tends to be rewarded (when all other things are equal) give this strategy a little extra thought. That’s where Wabi-sabi comes in.
Posted on February 8, 2010 by Bill Hansen
Google is putting their money where their mouth isn’t: brand marketing via
broadcast media.
The internet advertising behemoth has been running broadcast ads since mid-January and invested an estimated $5 million for a single 53-second Super Bowl TV ad. The spot, an emotion-laden story about life, love and adventure, driven by Google searching, was one of the critic’s favorites this morning.
What most advertising pundits missed was this: Why does a company that has unlimited ability to advertise and build name recognition across billions of web pages every single day need to advertise on TV? The answer: Google is facing real competition today from Microsoft/Bing, and soon probably from Apple. They realize that they can’t just win with superior algorithms any more. And they know something that a company learns by driving and analyzing 60% of internet advertising: internet ads do a lousy job of branding and building desire.
Posted on February 3, 2010 by The Growthwire Team
Each month, Access Points highlights a way for businesses to creatively and cost-effectively reach the large communities of radio listeners in their markets. This post pertains to several specific types of businesses: primarily the restaurant, golf, ski, and spa categories.
When someone hears the term “no cost” advertising, his or her first reaction is usually skepticism: you can’t get something valuable for free. (Their next reaction is often to wonder, as in “can I get some?”)
Yes, there really is a way to get valuable, high-reach, high-impact marketing for your restaurant, golf course, or several other specific businesses for no incremental cost. The program is typically called “Half-Off” (while it is free to the business, half-off is the value proposition for the end-consumer).
It works very simply: the business buys an advertising promotion from the station using gift certificates instead of cash. The radio station then resells those gift certificate to it’s audience via its website – at HALF OFF. $50 gift certificates for the business, for example, which would sell for $25 online, are typically sold out just minutes after they become available (these programs are immensely popular). The customer then redeems the certificate at the business and enjoys a great meal, round of golf, or massage.
Posted on January 8, 2010 by Bill Hansen
All too often, our business cards are designed for utilitarian purposes: affordability and utilizing the artistic expertise that most small business owners have on-hand at the time. At the least, they help us distribute our contact information and at best, many show that we care enough about our work to invest in color printing and good paper stock. But ask yourself, does your card really say much about what makes your business
special in that critical first impression?
Whether it’s time to replace your depleted stock or you want to improve the direct impact on business that clever identity/marketing can provide, consider investing in a winning first (and hopefully, lasting) impression with a great business card this year. These eleven examples are extremely clever and several are quite expensive. But they show different uses of design, layout, materials, and manipulation that strongly reinforce the business’ brand. The one thing that they all share, beyond the stuff that goes into the card, is that a great deal of thought has gone into what the card means and tells us about the business. Hopefully, one or more will provide inspiration to get you started on your own winning design!
Posted on January 7, 2010 by Bill Hansen
With recent advances in search technology, your customers’ experiences can now be instantly in the public domain and, in many cases, magnified by the size and nature of social networks. This adds to the existing risks posed by sites that offer un-moderated ‘ratings’ of local businesses – many of which you may not even know exist.
If you don’t already, its time to start taking steps to manage your brand’s reputation online – at the very least, to find out if there are any reputation-killers lurking in the dark recesses of the web. For most businesses, this can be as simple as a doing a couple of quick searches each month, or setting up an automated Google Alert to do the searching for you. Other businesses may need to dedicate more effort to this issue; particularly ones that are active in social media, have high staff turnover, face very aggressive competitors, or who’ve had problems with product quality or customer service.
In this, the first of two posts on Reputation Management, we’ll cover why you should be concerned and how you can take steps to monitor what’s said about you or your business online. In the second post, we’ll focus on how to use this information, including strategies for remedying bad situations.
Posted on November 3, 2009 by The Experts
Every month, our team of marketing, operations, and strategy professionals put their heads together to answer a reader’s question about growing his/her small business. You can click here to submit your own question, and please feel free to join this discussion by adding your comments below
Jon Whittaker, Owner of Jon David Salon
Q: I recently purchased advertising in our city’s lifestyle magazine that has a pretty large circulation. I purchased a full-page ad for September, which is a big month for my business. As part of my buy, the magazine came out and photographed my salon and even included it in their “What’s Hot” feature. I’ve got a great-looking space that photographed very well and included my exclusive product lines in the ad to set my salon apart from other smaller shops. I thought I had a great deal, and anticipated a lot of new traffic, but only got 3 new customers from the advertising – a big disappointment. What happened?
