The Marketing Bulletin Provides Practical marketing Tips and Advice
This page is a resource for businesses that wish to hone their marketing skills. About once per month, we'll publish a new issue. If you're a busy, on-the-go manager, you can get these issues via podcast subscription. Go to the left sidebar, and click on the picture. You can receive automatic updates using the FREE iTunes software.
Welcome to "The Marketing Bulletin" for May Ten, 2007.
This podcast is being recorded in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. I'm here to speak with a group of community college educators about sales and marketing. The primary talk is about viral marketing, and I'll share some of the points with you right now.
Some of you may know already, but most college textbooks about marketing are a bit outmoded. The marketing principles in the textbooks are sound; yet the tactics are dated. I have not seen the term "Viral Marketing" in any college marketing textbooks that I've reviewed. I know this because I teach marketing courses at the local community college, where I'm an adjunct faculty member in the business division. I review marketing textbooks to use in the classroom.
Viral marketing is a wonderful tactic to employ. I recently attended an advertising presentation put on by the advertising agency hired by the Wisconsin Department of Tourism. She proclaimed "It's hard to reach the twenty-somethings!" In other words, that firm lacks the skills to reach this demographic, and this demographic is your future or current customer. Viral marketing is one solution. The definition of viral marketing is that the marketing communication spreads like a virus.
Viral marketing is easy to do: It's as easy as emailing a link to your colleagues or friends. Here is an example, just click on the bottom of this screen right now (if you're viewing this podcast via iTunes). When you click, I redirect you to a webpage that I select, which contains this file, or a similar file, and then you email the link to your friends. Your viral marketing must have relevant content. For the twenty-somethings, Paul James Marketing mimics their behavior by using the devices that they use, including mobile devices, hand-held devices, and other portable devices, for example.
Another important component of viral marketing is the communication's interactivity. Your message will fail if it lacks interactivity. Click on the bottom of your screen right now to learn more about interactivity...See, this message is interactive. I cannot reveal all of my tactics, because the methods Paul James Marketing uses are proprietary.
Viral marketing tactics usually include a visual component. Because most of the mobile devices in use today have a display screen, powerful visuals help spread the message rapidly. Many visual tactics can be used; however, I would not suggest sitting in front of a camera and giving a lecture like this. It's boring! But, you're my audience--not the twenty-somethings. Click on the screen now to learn more about audio / visual viral marketing tactics using interactivity.
Viral marketing is here to stay, and you should start to incorporate this tactic to distribute your message. Most of the communication tactics employed to drive tourism traffic to the Northwoods is woefully traditional. Although you should not simply drop the traditional method of communicating with your target audience, unless you want to commit career-icide, you should incorporate viral and interactive communications to reach your future customers. Paul James Marketing can help you. Send me an email right now to learn how you can incorporate viral marketing into your current program. Email to paul@pauljamesmarketing.com. My email address appears below (you can pause this message to copy my email address.)
The community college educators in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota are ahead of the curve. They understand that today's marketing is much more than the four P's, and marketing communications should contain interactivity and have a viral component.
As with all marketing communications, I prefer to have a clear call to action. So here it is. Get a free marketing analysis from Paul James Marketing by clicking on the screen right now. I will review your current marketing strategy, and provide you with an analysis of your core message, branding strategy, target market, and product offering, etc. Click on the screen now to see an example. You too can have an analysis of your communications for your business.
Thank you for watching.
This is Paul James for "The Marketing Bulletin."
Welcome to "The Marketing Bulletin" for March 22, 2007.
The AIDA Advertising Model
This is the Marketing Bulletin for March 22, 2007. This episode is about using an advertising model to help make your advertising more effective.
Good, effective advertising is a hard thing to pull off. Most advertising that I consume is so poorly targeted that it is offensive. Most advertising I consume is created so poorly that it is distasteful. Most advertising I consume is so irrelevant that it is odious.
How do you create an advertisement that will be effective? How do you develop an advertisement to meet your objectives that is targeted, creative, and effective? Well, I'm here to help you answer these questions. There are four attributes that all your advertisements should have, and they are so easy to comprehend, that anybody can apply these principles.
I've worked in these Northwoods communities for quite a while. I placed advertisements in all of the available media here. Of course, I worked through salespeople who represented their medium.
These salespeople, who are responsible for creating, scripting, and directing your advertisements, did not have the basic understanding of how to conceive an effective advertisement. In fact, one of the salespersons from NRG Media, a firm that owns most terrestrial radio stations here, argued with me about how I wanted creative execution of the advertisements I was placing with her. This was a pretty large media buy of over fifty-thousand-dollars.
I won the argument: I did not place the order with her.
So, how do you know if your advertising salesperson is working for you to create the best possible advertisement? The answer is pretty easy; employ the AIDA advertising model. Here are the four basic elements for effective advertisements using this model: Awareness, interest, desire, and action. This advertising model is literally on page one of every advertising textbook that I've read. This model is so basic, that if your media salesperson dose not know what this is, you're better off not using that medium.
The model is simple to employ, and it's useful in all media. I'll give a quick example now. Say you're placing an advertisement in a local newspaper. You will need to first draw the attention of the reader. This is usually accomplished with a strong headline/image combination that triggers an emotional response from your target market. Next, you provide sales copy about your product for the reader that appeals to their needs (emotional, spiritual, physical, etc.) and that holds their interest. Together, this drives a desire for your product, if executed properly. Finally, your advertisement must stimulate action.
Stimulating action is usually easy to accomplish by creating a sense of urgency and scarcity of the product. For example, you could exclaim a limited-time offer, or limited inventory, or one-time-offer, or the like.
Using the AIDA model is an easy way to guide the creation of your advertisements. There are many nuances involved that interact to create a great advertisement. Once you start to use this advertising model for your own advertisements, you will notice how a small change to one part of your ad affects the other areas, and ultimately your profits.
Go ahead, be bold! Use this model when you create your advertisements.
Of course, if you'd like to have those pesky advertising salespeople stop calling on you, just click here. I'll be happy to help you eliminate them.
This is Paul James for The Marketing Bulletin.
Welcome to "The Marketing Bulletin" for January 8, 2007.
Advertising Clutter
The Marketing Bulletin this month is about advertising clutter.
There is a trend on Madison Avenue to reduce the advertising clutter that pervades our society. Here are some examples of advertising clutter that you, as a marketer, must constantly deal with.
In the area where I live in extreme Northcentral Wisconsin, the market is inundated with newspapers: six weeklies, one biweekly, three dailies, and at least seven shoppers. I have not even mentioned the regional, state, and national papers that are available. There are also at least three house-shopping-type real estate publications, multiple events and activities brochures, visitor's guides, maps, menus, and placemats, etc.
This same market is over saturated with radio station formats: one oldies, two religious, one community, two classic rock, one country, three adult contemporary, one top 40, one sports, three nostalgia, and many other signals on the fringe.
The television broadcast signals in this market include ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Being in a rural environment, most households have either cable or satellite television. Most services in this area provide at minimum 60 channels of programming. Another pervasive medium is the internet. I don't know how to quantify the number of websites that vie for the attention of the people in this market. I haven't even mentioned cell phones, iPods, electronic toys, lap-top computers, hand-held PDAs, satellite radios, and myriad devices that entertain and or inform.
For a marketer, this proliferation of advertising venues is daunting. How do you cut through all this clutter? How do you get your message to stand out?
These are tough questions. Madison Avenue is trying new tactics to cut through the clutter. You may have noticed, and it's throw back to the early days of television, fewer commercials. Some networks are allowing sponsorships deals where a single advertiser buys all the ad time during the show, and not using all of the time available. The debut episode of "Heroes" was sponsored by Nissan North America, for example. After careful measurements, recall of advertising in shows that ran fewer ads was much greater. After all, each hour of network television has fifteen minutes of advertising available. You can do the math if each ad is thirty seconds.
The Wall Street Journal reports that consumers are "Flocking to emerging venues such as web-based video" and advertisers are trying to keep pace. Advertisers are putting less emphasis on traditional TV and print ads and experimenting with "videos posted on YouTube and traditional videos posted on the web." Another venue is placing ads on mobile devices without aggravating the end user. Because these new interactive devices provide better measurement of actual advertising response, advertisers are demanding more evidence from traditional media on whether there media is influencing the consumer's buying decisions.
Advertising clutter is tough to cut through. Try this experiment: Open your favorite newspaper to the dining-out section. Glance quickly at the page, and then read the first ad that catches your eye. Now, count the number of ads on that single page. You just discovered advertising clutter. Your eyes scanned over many ads, but only one ad out of many caught your attention. If you look closer, I bet that all of the ads have a similar shape and or size.
Advertising clutter makes good advertising ineffective. You need a powerful advertising strategy to cut the clutter to get your message to your prospects. Because you may not have an advertising budget to purchase all the ads on a network television show, you must find other strategies to cut the clutter. Paul James Marketing can provide you with strategies and tactics to get your message through. Learn more at Paul James Marketing.com.
That's all for now. The Marketing Bulletin is produced once per month, and published via email, podcast, and the web. This is our contribution to the clutter vying for your attention.
Welcome to "The Marketing Bulletin" for December 6, 2006.
The Everybody Pit
This newsletter is designed for you to learn practical marketing tips and ideas. You may also be able to solve some common marketing problems as well. Each episode explores one concept or idea related to marketing. Each concept is relevant to you if you desire to grow your business or organization. This episode we explore three easy steps to create consistent marketing communications. If you want to learn more practical marketing tips and ideas, enter your information below. Now, let's begin!
Consistency is important in all communications. But, consistency is even more important in marketing communications. When you're communicating with your friend, for example, you need not be consistent in your spoken words because your body language, tone of voice, hand gestures, and other nonverbal cues will communicate your meaning. Your friend will understand what you mean to say even if your spoken words differ from what you want to say.
In marketing, however, you must communicate the message you want without nonverbal cues. One way to send the right message is to be consistent with your messaging. Since most traditional marketing communications is outgoing only (in other words, you're not having an interactive conversation with your prospect), you must be consistent with your message. Here is an example.
I was consulting a local business owner. She had a re-grand opening for her retail store. She is doing everything right: she has a clearly-defined target market, she decorates the store for the pleasure of the target market, she stocks inventory for her target market, etc. So far so good. Then she advertised her re-grand opening.
She purchased local advertisements in one daily newspaper, three weekly newspapers, one weekly shopper, and four radio stations. I asked to review her advertisements. I placed all the newspaper ads on a table, and we looked at them together.
She used five place advertisements, one ad in each publication. Each advertisement was about two columns wide by about three inches tall. However, each advertisement had different copy and creative layout. Two ads had a nice graphic, one ad had a graphic surrounded by a border, and two ads had a border. Each ad invited the public into the store for the re-grand opening at the specific time.
But, reviewing each ad side-by-side, it was clear that if a prospect read the advertisement in one publication, that same prospect would have to re-read the advertisement if they saw it in a different publication. In this situation, the business owner should have used the same exact advertisement in each publication. This would have a larger impact with multiple impressions on the prospect, if the prospect uses multiple publications. The prospect would not have to re-read an advertisement when they saw it more than once.
Then, she played the radio spot. We reviewed it. She placed the same ad on all four radio stations, which is great. However, her radio ads talked about her offerings, then mentioned her re-grand opening. In this situation, the radio ads should have eliminated the offering message, and simply invited the prospects in for the grand opening. A single, consistent message is a sound strategy.
Also, in her radio advertisements, she could have told the listeners to review her newspaper advertisements. Then the message could be heard and read, increasing the level of recall for the prospect.
Consistency is important in marketing communications. Prospects have a very small attention span. When you do reach them, don't confuse them with multiple messages, different images, or dissimilar layouts.
So here are three things you can do to create consistent marketing communications:
1. Create your advertisements with a single message; (Use more white space to have a bigger impact.)
2. Use the same print advertisement in all printed marketing communications; (Choose a designer that you like best, and have that person design all your advertisements, and then have that designer send the original artwork to all the other media.)
3. Use the same message in each media outlet; (For example, use your television voice-over for your radio spots, and use similar copy for your print advertisements.)
Using the three ideas above will help you be consistent in your marketing communications. If you would like a personal consultation, send me an email to paul@pauljamesmarketing.com.
This is Paul James for The Marketing Bulletin.
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