By David Sanders, Certified Master Consultant
Who is your competition? Is it just the guy down the street offering the same products and services as you do? Think again. Your message of do business with me is competing for the attention and the mind of the consumer with Coca Cola, Apple, GM and the biggest advertisers out there.
How many advertising messages have you been exposed to this week? The average American is subjected to over 3,000 – a day! Radio, TV, spam, Google, magazines, newspapers, fliers, billboards, signs lining both sides of the streets and soon your cell phone will be offering you deals from the businesses you walk by. That’s 21,000 messages a week, 90,000 a month and over a million advertising messages a year.
How can you get your message through all that noise?
That’s the subject of this article.
MARKETING BARRIER #1
If you try to solve the wrong problem, it won’t solve. If you’re out of gas, cleaning the windshield won’t help you. So first you must really grasp the problems we face today in getting new business.
Since you’re also a consumer, let’s look at it from that viewpoint. How do you handle all the ads clamoring for your attention? You put up spam blockers. You stop watching as soon as the TV ads come on. You flick through websites. You change radio stations when the ads start. You go through your mail standing over the round file.
So how long does a marketer have to get a message through the defensive barriers erected by almost all consumers? You have a quarter of a second to attract their attention, or your ad, flier, website, brochure – that you spent all that time and money on will be physically or mentally trashed. Probably the trash can by your desk fills up every week with marketing materials that combined cost companies tens if not hundreds of dollars to produce and deliver.
WHAT YOU MUST DO
Your marketing must grab attention. Now. Instantly. This is usually done with graphics, photos, colors and/or eye candy. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it can be grasped a lot faster than reading all those words, so it’s useful here. GM and beer ads have been using sexy women to attract attention to Corvettes and foamy brew for decades.
Take a moment to do a drill that I’ve done with hundreds of professionals and business owners. Grab a large yellow pages book and look in a section that has lots of ads, like dentists or auto repair (you can view the listings where your business would appear later).
How many of those ads attract your eye as you flip through the pages? How many don’t get a second glance? How many repulse you?
MARKETING BARRIER #2
OK, let’s say that you’ve overcome barrier #1 – you’ve gotten someone’s attention. How long do you keep it? About two seconds. What must you do in those two seconds?
You’ve got to interest them. If you don’t get their interest in that brief instant, all the effort and money put into your promotion gets wasted because they’ll discard it and move on.
Let’s look at those yellow pages ads again, just the ones that attracted your attention (because most people won’t look at the ones that don’t catch their eye).
Which ones of those ads that grabbed your attention actually interest you? Now look at just those ads a little closer.
What is it about them that interested you? In most cases there is a headline or bulleted item that piques your interest. On the other hand, there are probably many headlines that don’t do anything for you at all, like Joe’s Garage or Joesph Langenfoder, DDS.
How do you know what will interest prospective clients? You ask them. That’s what surveys and market research are for. These get the buttons which you can push and get a response from potential clients. Ideally you want to use big buttons in your headlines, words that will interest 30 to 50% of the people reading the ad.
Those who don’t do their homework and use buttons that interest 10% or 20% of their readers have to spend much more on their marketing for a lot lower return and there go
your profits.
BARRIER #3
OK, now you’re all set. You know how to catch the eye so people will at least give you a couple of seconds to interest them. And you’ve successfully gotten their interest. Now what are you supposed to do? This is where many ads die.
You’ve got to deliver your message.
How do you figure out what message you want to deliver? Here’s a simple way – what do you tell people you meet or who call in that will get them to want to become your clients? Tell them that in your ad! Don’t forget to have your web address and phone number easy to find and tell them to call.
Grab that dog-eared yellow page book again and look at the ads that overcame the attract barrier and the interest barrier. Do they deliver any message at all? What is it? There are not many ads that pass the test this far.
STAND OUT
The three tips above will help your marketing stand out from the competition. There are some ads and marketing actions that are head and shoulders above the crowd and get heard through all the noise. Yours can be among them.
Now that you have a brief outline of some of the many tools to address the three key barriers to your marketing success – learn, practice and use them skillfully and you will find your marketing suddenly works!
David Sanders, certified master consultant, is President of Creative Business Strategies and former marketing director of a Beverly Hills ad agency. He can be contacted at ceo@creativestrats.com.
