People will perceive your business the way your marketing represents your business. The marketing bridge is made up of whatever links you to your customers and potential customers. That means everything, from the way you answer your phone, to the clothes you wear, to the color of your building. Everything you do or have done to attract and keep customers is part of the marketing bridge. Given that definition, almost every recommendation in this book is in some way connected to the marketing bridge, but the specific parts or "elements" of the marketing bridge we'll be referring to in the first five sections have a direct, though not exclusive, connection to local advertising.

If you don't do so already, you must find a way to obtain and record accurate and updated information about your existing customers. The information you gather should include age range, gender, income category and other information to assist you in evaluating your customer base.

Who do you want to reach with your message? Usually a business will want to reach prospects with the same profile as its existing customers. A dress shop that attracts younger women between the ages of 18 and 25 will normally want to advertise to women of that same age range. So the first step is to get an accurate profile of your existing customers. Once you've done that, it's just a matter of targeting prospects who fit that profile.

Major corporations want information about their customers. For example, they’ll induce you to send back a warranty card that’s filled with questions about you and your family. In addition to selling your name to mailing-list companies, corporations use that information to do several things:

• They make decisions on advertising and marketing based on that information.
• They make future product decisions based on what they learn from you.
• They contact you to sell you another of their products.

By determining the value of a new customer, you can decide how much to invest to acquire a new customer through advertising/marketing. This is not an easy evaluation to make, but it's a critical one if you're going to manage your advertising expenditures with any degree of accuracy and justification.

Do you advertise to "bring people in" or to "keep your name before the public?" Advertising can and should be much more specific, more exact:

The purpose of advertising is to create an equity position in a target market and to reach and motivate a sufficient number of consumers so that a business can realize a specific growth objective.

(An "equity position" in the context of advertising is when people think of your business when they have a need for the product/service you sell. The equity position in a market would be when the consumer thinks of your business first.)

There are two primary reasons for setting measurable growth objectives for your advertising:

1. You'll know exactly how many additional prospects you'll need on a daily basis to hit the growth objective.
2. You'll have a way to hold your advertising expenditures absolutely accountable.

It's called a Unique Selling Proposition or Preemptive Advantage.

What is it that you have or do that your competition does not have or cannot do? By answering that question you'll be finding a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or a Preemptive Advantage (PA). You'll also be finding a way to position your business relative to your competitors.

There are five indisputable reasons to advertise all the time:

1. People Shop All the Time
2. People Move
3. People Forget
4. People Often Take Their Time Before Buying
5. To Establish an Equity Position in the Consumer Community

By "advertising," We mean primarily the use of the local mass media: radio, TV, newspaper and billboards.

For our purposes, don't include Yellow Pages ads in your advertising budget. That's a fixed, monthly expense once it's ordered, and you have no flexibility with it as you might other media.

How far out do you plan your advertising? Do you have a one-year plan? A five-year plan? A 10-year plan? (The Japanese have a national growth plan that extends for hundreds of years!) At minimum, a local advertiser should have a long-term, flexible budget, a Unique Selling Proposition or Preemptive Advantage and a commitment to at least a 12-month advertising plan.

A growth-oriented promotional strategy consists of three actions:

• Informing
• Persuading
• Reminding

A Unique Selling Proposition or Preemptive Advantage is not just a slogan or a good idea. It's going to determine the perception and experience people are going to have before and after doing business with you.

Can you live up to the perception your advertising will give customers of your qualities, prices, service, merchandise, conveniences or selection?

Knowing the difference between response and results will save you fortunes. A great number of advertisers seem to confuse the two, so it's important to clarify the difference:

"Response" is when someone comments on your ads, tells you that you look good on TV or sings your radio jingle.

"Results" is when they buy something.

The way most advertisers attempt to track results is by asking their customers what brought them in. Allow us to share an experience:

When Michael was getting started in the advertising field, he was responsible for the successful grand opening of a new "lumber" store. This was a complete store that carried almost everything imaginable.

There are two types of Positioning that come into play for successful local advertising. The first is a Competitive Position, or positioning your business relative to your competitors. The second is an Equity Position (See Rule 7). You gain a Competitive Position by developing a Unique Selling Proposition (See Rule 9). You gain an Equity Position by the consistent exposure of your USP through advertising. The way to get your USP quickly into the minds of the consumer is with the use of a Positioning Statement or Slogan.

The media hire salespeople to sell time and space. Don't expect those same people to be copywriters. A piece of copy that sells well might take days to write. A blockbuster headline alone might take hours to create. Turning your copywriting over to a media salesperson or media copywriter is a huge gamble. We recommend that you study the following guidelines on copy components and learn to write your own copy. If you can't write your own copy, at least learn the rules so you can be your own copy editor.

Composing your advertising copy can be far less painful or stressful if you use the critical components as a map to get you through the process. The way to ensure the effectiveness of your ad is to make sure it includes all the critical components.

There are certain "buzz" words, when used in print copy or electronic (radio and TV) copy, that seem to get more of the consumer's attention. Our advertising industry has, over the past several decades, "trained" consumers to react positively to these words. When you sprinkle your copy liberally with these words you'll be upping the odds of winning.

In Rule 8, we set a growth objective for Acme Jewelers that would require an additional five prospects per day to walk through Acme's doors. Just how realistic is it to persuade those additional five prospects?

Acme has estimated that their competition is getting a combined 285 prospects every day. We'll call these 285 people the "competitive pool" of prospects. These prospects are also called "Now Buyers" because these people are in the market to buy right now.

There's another pool of prospects who are not shopping right now but who might be shoppers sometime in the next few months. These are called "Future Buyers." These people could become Now Buyers at any time.

The first thing to understand is that media sales people are trianed to sell their inventory, not your inventory.

Each of the local mass media has specific strengths and weaknesses relative to domination and impact. Your job is to find the mass media most suitable to your budget, and to your objectives of establishing an equity position in a short time, say a few weeks, and of providing the impact necessary to motivate a few new prospects on a daily basis. This is all done by reaching "sufficient" numbers of consumers in your target market. "Sufficiency" is the key.

Frankly, we don't like the subject of ratings very much. A lot of damage has been done to local advertisers as a result of the self-serving misuse of ratings information by some media salespeople. In addition, too many ad agencies use the research to avoid accountability. ("We bought everything by the book. It must have been the weather.")

Don't worry about the consumers you can't afford to reach!

There is a word that describes people who have succumbed to the popular, alluring, seductive notion that "the more people you reach with your ad, the better chance you have of growing." The word is "scammed."

Local advertisers may buy TV, radio, newspaper, bus benches and billboards, but not get much impact with any one of them. This is the result of what's called the "shotgun" approach to advertising. It's also called "spraying and praying." This approach delivers large numbers of people, but no consistent impact. Lots of reach, little frequency. Lot's of hope, few returns.

Schedule your advertising to give your message the most growth impact it can have:

1. Choose a medium to dominate.
2. Determine if your chosen medium for domination reaches a sufficient number of your target consumers.
3. Schedule your electronic ads for impact.
4. Determine the relative affordability of the schedule.
5. Make a 12-month buy with a four-month option.

Hold your advertising dollars accountable:

1. Set up a monthly tracking system that shows changes from the same month last year in.
2. As you compare the changes this year with the same month last year, it is vital to note any local and national economic trends, and any internal or external marketing bridge changes that may have occurred. These variables can help explain the results you get.
3. At the end of four months, evaluate your advertising results. If, by then, you can see that you've reached the average percentage of growth that you need each month to achieve your growth objective by the end of the 12-month growth objective period, the program is working.
4. Any copy or scheduling changes that may have to be made to accelerate the growth process can only be determined by the results of the tracking system you put in place. The tracking system is your key to absolute accountability.

Would you rather spend $100 on an ad that produced $120 in net profits, or $1 on an ad that returned nothing?

You wouldn't think that was a silly question with the emphasis that's placed on low rates and cost efficiency by media salespeople and local advertisers. Some advertisers boast about their low media rates, and some media reps laugh about how they got you anyway, but that whole subject may be just another diversion, another red herring that keeps everyone distracted while the Real Issues get lost in the confusion.

If you're not focused on the Real Issues, you'll never know if you're winning efficiently, no matter what your rates are!

 

 

People make decisions to purchase goods and services in the subconscious mind. The easiest way to get through the conscious mind and into the subconscious mind is by repetition. The objective is to inform, persuade and remind. Remind people in a way that generates consistent growth as you inform and persuade them.

Out of 100 prospects, how many will not do business with you because of price? If you are the kind of business that's positioned itself as a discount house and you don't have the discounts, you'll probably lose a fairly large percentage of prospects to a lower price. But what if you're not positioned as a major price discounter? Out of 100 prospects, you'll lose only nine prospects to a lower price. And if you are known for your excellent service, you'll retain 91 out of 100 customers.

Sales can be useful if used sparingly. Consumers are assaulted by so-called "sales" every day. -Consumers have become disbelieving as a result of retailers who will use any excuse to have a sale. As a result, the only sales that are viewed as legitimate are those conducted by companies that have very few of them.

 

Strange as it may seem, few companies let their own employees know what the company is advertising!

We've called businesses several times with a question about an advertised item only to be told by an employee that they aren't familiar with the ad or the offer!