Every Advertisement Should Be Part of An Overall Marketing Strategy
I have people come to me all the time wanting me to write ads for their
products or services. Most of them about have a heart attack when I tell them
that I never write an ad for less than $2,500 and my average price is $5,000.
For a single ad. Just one. The reason is, that there’s a lot of legwork and
research that has to happen before I can write an ad. Most of what needs to
be figured out before putting pencil to paper, or fingers to keyboard, is going
to be covered in the rest of this program. But here’s an understatement:
There are a lot of things you’ve got to understand and take into consideration
before you can churn out even a simple advertisement. Then you’ve got to
create a master strategy for advertising, marketing, and selling your product
that takes into account your selling advantages, or the inside reality, and the
customer’s needs. You can’t just go around making stuff up all the time on
the spur of the moment that’s based on nothing more than your best guess of
what’s going to work. You’ve got to be more sophisticated than that. What’s
the Boy Scout motto? Be prepared. Same thing in advertising, know your
strategy, know what your customers want, innovate your business, know the
best way to say things, then write the ads.
I’ll just give you a quick laundry list of stuff that’s got to be sorted out and
deciphered before you start writing. Now I’m not talking about techniques
here, I’m talking about base level grounding materials that precede any ad
writing. Things like determining your advertisement’s objective: Is it trying
to get orders? Inquiries? Generate leads? Promote brand awareness? What is
your ad trying to do? You’ve got to figure out who your target market is and
what they need to hear to make a compelling sales argument and in what
format they will most readily accept your information. What’s important to
them? Would they watch a video brochure of your product or do they just
need a postcard? What kinds of things influence their buying decisions?
Have they been burned by someone in your industry before? Is what you’re
selling not important enough for them to put a lot of thought into it? Or is it
such a major purchase that they’re going to have to see something really
impressive from you before they’ll buy? Or is it somewhere in between?
You’ve got to know all this before you start writing the advertisement or
else it’s inevitable that you’ll be saying the wrong things to the wrong
people and you’ll end up like the cat on the hot stove who draws the wrong
conclusion; in this case about advertising. You’ve got to know this stuff!
Here’s the good news: it’s not THAT difficult. But it’s imperative that you
create a master game plan for all of your advertising. Every ad you place
should have a specific, predetermined purpose. Each ad should pull its own
weight and make a profit for itself. We have clients all the time who will
come running in and say, “Hey, I just got out of a meeting with the radio
sales rep and they’ll give us a great deal on this block of airtime. What do
you think?” Well let me see your marketing plan and see if this “wonderful
deal” fits into that plan.
Or a guy will say, “Look, I know that you say all that stuff about creating a
whole marketing plan, but I really, really need a flyer right now. Can you
just put that together real fast and then worry about the rest of the marketing
plan later?” And the answer is yes, but I can’t guarantee it will work! This
exact thing happened recently with a guy who had an aluminum siding and
replacement window business. Now I don’t know what you think about
these telemarketing companies that call you all the time during dinner and
ask you to buy siding for your house. I think they’re annoying. But since
we’ve done a lot of work in the construction and the home improvement
business, I already knew quite a bit about how to put his entire marketing
plan together, before I did any of the preliminary leg work I just mentioned.
Hey, after you’ve done this a couple of thousand times in a couple of
hundred different industries, I would hope that you could put together a
marketing plan for a siding company. I mean, come on, wouldn’t you get a
little nervous if your heart surgeon was wheeling you into the operating
room and was asking the nurse, “Hey, where’s the Heart Surgery for
Dummies book?”
I unfolded an entire marketing plan to him, a strategy called the “Code of
Ethics and Competency” that is excellent for good, honest companies who
happen to be in industries that have problems with shady operators who have
a reputation for being less than forthright with consumers like siding
contractors, for instance. I showed him how to integrate the strategy into his
telemarketing, into his advertising, into his yard signs, into his tradeshow
booths, into his sales presentations, and into every single aspect of his
marketing. I’m talking about a full-blown powerhouse marketing strategy
that would absolutely annihilate every one of his competitors. And his
brilliant comment was, “Yeah, but right now I just need the flyer that my
guys can stick on people’s doors. Can you do that?”
The answer is NO!!! Why? Because a single flyer just creates an outside
perception that the inside reality can’t support. You just can’t shortcut the
system. You can’t just slap a couple of techniques on there and hope you’ll
get stellar results. You’ve got to take the time to put the plan together and
build a case that convinces your prospects that it’s worth their time and
money to even consider doing business with you.
-Y2Marketing