Marketing genius falls into the Thomas Edison model of “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Far too often, good marketing is seen as something that only a chosen few can pull off well. Feeling at a loss, some agents take the “ignore it and it will go away” approach. When that happens, what tends to go away is the business.
Then there are those who have never differentiated between enjoying marketing and being good at marketing. They are marketing legends in their own minds, and the result is usually an ineffectual campaign. And let’s not overlook the ad of desperation. The “I have to get some money in now” approach tends to end up an expensive disaster that exacerbates rather than helps the financial crisis at hand.
There is a better way
Marketing is a job. Success ultimately comes from just doing the necessary work. So where does one go to start putting together a practical and profitable approach to marketing?
Your prospects know what they want
Begin by finding out what is important to your customers and prospects. Accurate information is the foundation of any solid marketing plan. Don’t assume you know what your market wants. Ask them. Pick up the phone. Have a discussion. Even better, invite a few key people over, order in pizza, and hold a roundtable discussion. This is an informal focus group, and it can be very effective.
Tag lines speak volumes
If you’ve done an adequate job of gathering information, you should have a pretty good idea of how to start massaging that information into a message. What do your clients and prospects want that you can do better than anyone else on the planet? If that doesn’t exist, develop it. Without differentiating your product or service, you may muddle along in business, but you won’t have the tools to accomplish much more than that.
Keep your message stated in the positive. It is proven that headlines offering assurances of success, hope, achievement, and possibility consistently outperform negative, fear-based headlines.
Get media savvy
You have your message. Now how do you plan to tell the world? Newspaper, broadcast, direct mail, or a combination of media are all viable options. Evaluate the demographics, costs, potential returns, and any other information for each potential medium. Call each medium’s other advertisers to see how it is working for them. The paradox is that you need to target your market as accurately as you can, but the only way to know how a specific market will respond to your message is to test.
To properly test your campaign, start out small. If you get a response, that response will most likely increase as you repeat your message and expand your audience. If you don’t get a suitable response, no matter how many times you repeat the message or how extensively you expand your exposure, your campaign is not going to be profitable.
Reality check
Here is a sobering fact: No prospect really cares about what you have to say, what you are selling, or even that you are in business. Anyone who even bothers to notice your message has only one objective: to justify not letting your message add to the clutter of their lives. What that translates into in the real world is this: You have less than four seconds to grab a prospect’s attention, and less than 20 seconds to get your message across. Yet the longer you can keep someone involved in your communication, the more likely they are to say “yes.”
There is no magic bullet. However, the more options you have, the more likely you are to succeed. Start by staying open to all possibilities. Broadcast ads are becoming more affordable to produce and to air. One secondary advantage is that many (but not all) radio and cable channels fill in unsold ad space by rerunning ads at no additional charge or at a greatly reduced price. The ad business is rapidly evolving. It pays to stay on top of current trends and be sure you are always working from facts, not assumptions.
Just as broadcast media needs to fill ad slots, print publications also have ad spaces to fill and often offer last-minute deals. In order to take advantage of these opportunities, you must have camera-ready material on hand. One area especially open for negotiation is the cost of adding color to your ad, and color is important since it is proven to increase your response rate.
Consider everything
If you are looking at newspapers, don’t overlook freestanding inserts. There is a reason why your newspaper is overflowing with ad inserts: They work. In one real-world experience, a small postcard-sized insert was distributed to approximately 18,000 people per week in a rotating market identified by ZIP code. The same exact piece was blown up to a half-page ad, printed in a newspaper, and distributed to over 200,000 people. The freestanding insert consistently pulled just shy of 1 percent for weeks. The same ad printed in the newspaper netted one phone call and not a single sale.
Direct mail is powerful if done well. The two most important components of a successful direct mail promotion are the ability to identify your market and the ability to write, or find someone who can write, killer copy.
Don’t overlook the importance of design in your printed materials. Design is critical to your success. It leads the eye to your copy, the next page, and the response device. Work with a designer who knows how to make design work for you. The fonts used can either enhance or prevent readability. That one component, readability, can mean a response difference of up to 25 percent.
What next?
Work from the big picture. What is your follow up? Marketing is not a series of single events. There needs to be continuity in your message and your look. It is generally accepted that a prospect must see your company’s name three times before they even remember you exist. Without continuity, each exposure essentially becomes a first look. That can result in scores of exposures and untold amounts of money wasted before anyone even remembers who you are, much less decides you are worth investing in.
Meeting the marketing challenge is not for the faint of heart. You will make mistakes. There is no such thing as perfect. Profitable is good enough. With planning, research, and ingenuity, you will no longer see marketing as dreaded overhead. Instead, you will find yourself reveling in the returns you are enjoying from your marketing investment.
Mitzi Crall, Ph.D. is a sales