How to Start Smart and End up with All Kinds of Cash

Coming up with great ads for your company begins long before you write web copy or design a brochure.

You can start smart by considering the identity of your audience, your own brand message, and the strategy in which you want to deliver it.

Target Market

Know Thine Customer!

Seems like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised by how much advertising is incorrectly targeted to the wrong audience.

Before you even begin writing those ads, creating that brochure or developing web content, find out the answers to some critical questions.

Who is your customer?

Are they male or female?

How old?

Do they have kids or are they childless by choice?

What do they do for a living?

What drives them to purchase?

Is it economics? (And who isn’t driven by price these days?)

Is it fear of failure? (Look at some classic 1960s ads to see what Mad Ave determined was the driver behind purchases made by women—the desire to be a perfect wife and mother by way of a clean oven, a sparkling toilet and the perfect oven in which to cook their roast beef dinner.)

Most importantly, what is your target’s problem and how are you going to solve it for them?

Put yourself in their position. See life from their perspective. The better you know your target, the more easily you’ll be able to craft your marketing message.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Know Thine Self!

Your USP is what distinguishes you from the competition. It is the characteristic of your brand that makes you stand out in the marketplace.

It is the reason, for example, that someone will choose to purchase your foot fungus powder over the other 378 brands of foot fungus powder on the market.

To determine your USP, ask yourself the following:

What can my company offer my target that no one else can?

Are our services new?

Do we offer products/services that are an improvement over what the competition is currently offering?

Are our services somehow more convenient to use either in contracting or in fulfillment?

Do we specialize in an area that others don’t offer?

Is the quality of our service better than the competition?

Viral Marketing

Know What's Catchy!

Viral marketing is just like that cold you had last week that you got from your kid, who got it from his classmate, who passed it on to her teacher, and on and on and on. It's a phenomenon that works exceptionally well with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and other social networking platforms.

When you create a message that’s fun, fascinating, provocative or amusing, your core audience is more likely to pass it on to their friends, who will forward it to their family, who will send it on to co-workers, etc., etc., etc.

From the original Hotmail viral campaign (those clickable email sig files attached to every email sent from a Hotmail account--“Get your free email at Hotmail”) to more complex, professionally produced videos, like the John West Salmon Bear Fight ads (with more than 1,182,953 views on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVS1UfCfxlU) viral marketing works.

If you can create a great viral marketing strategy, your target audience will be doing the marketing for you, and you won’t even have to put them on your payroll.

How’s that for smart?

Want to Know a Secret?

Ask me anything (about marketing your small biz, that is.) I'll reveal any and all marketing secrets ...kind of like those magicians who let people in on the secret of their magic tricks, much to the annoyance of all other magicians. Click on FOLLOW ME to find out the insider info stuff that others want to charge you for before they'll reveal.

Photo credit: Salvatore Vuono-- http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

Julie Andrew’s singing “Doe a Deer” in The Sound of Music keeps echoing in my head. I wish it would stop. But, I think there’s a good reason for it. When you’re starting your own venture into DIY marketing, you need the primer, the Dick and Jane early reader, the ABC’s, if you will.

So let’s begin:

Advertising—Both verb and noun...it’s the act of promoting your business and the final result of your marketing campaign. It’s what you’re going to do for now until you’re so incredibly successful that you can afford to hire a big Madison Ave Agency to do it for you. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Brand—Who are you? Or rather, who is your business? If you’re a consumer (and who isn’t) you know more about brand than you realize. Once you establish your brand identity (which we’ll do in the weeks ahead) you’ll know exactly what your brand stands for--your brand message and what it promises. Then all your advertising will grow organically from there. (Ooooh, that sounds so Oprah, doesn’t it?)

Competition—Who are you up against? Huge multinational corporations or the mom and pop shop on the corner? This is an important factor in your marketing, so don’t think it doesn’t matter. Start looking at your competitors ads and websites. What are they promising? How is your business different, and most importantly, better?

This is just the start of course, and it’s enough to keep you busy for now. (C’mon now—just be patient. You didn’t start reading Tolstoy the minute you learned the alphabet did you?)

Photo Credit: jscreationzs:
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1152