Marketing and advertising advice for owner-operated businesses
Ask any Boy Scout how to start a fire. He’ll tell you it’s a triangle: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Get enough of all three and you get a fire.
There’s a triangle of combustion like that in advertising: message, delivery, and engagement. Getting that triangle right will light a fire under your sales. Message is fuel, delivery is oxygen, and engagement generates heat. Ignition comes at the moment of conversion, when a visitor becomes a customer.Continue Reading
The Mississippi River overruns its banks and levies. Tens of thousands of acres of farmland are under water. It’s a disaster for farmers now. It will be a crisis for us soon enough. Farmers are ahead of the curve from us because they live and die everyday on the principle of sewing and reaping. We just know shopping and buying.Continue Reading
An Orange Creamsicle cake. The perfect end to my perfect meal at Geronimo in Santa Fe. Good enough for the kid in me to wish I’d had it first – and that’s when it dawned on me why so many advertising dollars are wasted.
Instead of starting with the meat of a marketing strategy, businesses jump to the “dessert” of media selection. That’s why the typical marketing meeting quickly devolves into:
“I want to do some TV. Let’s do some billboards. Do some radio and we’ll see traffic.”
This kind of do this and do that discussion leads to nothing but advertising do-do.
Before actually doing anything, we normally have a goal and a larger strategy, even on the mundane, day-to-day level. Most of us don’t just get up from our chairs and then wonder why; we decide we need to perk up and the best way to accomplish that would be another cup of coffee. In other words, we start with why, then we picture ourselves getting the coffee and perking up, and only then do we get up.
People who don’t do that – guys who just get up and wander around are usually patients in some kind of institution. The very aimlessness and irrationality of their behavior is characteristic of the mentally unbalanced. If only we had that same clarity in business!
Before DOing takes control of your next project, look at the bigger picture and ask yourself: Why are you in business? Is what you’re considering leading there? What are the alternatives? What’s your timetable? Keep going until you see it specifically. Write it down.
Be prepared: this will take more than a one-time five-minute sit-down. I work on mine at night before turning in. Then, look at it briefly in the morning.
Expressing your WHY in a dozen words or less helps you understand where you are now, what you want to be in the future. It clarifies what you need to DO. There’s one more step to getting the most from WHY:
Get a piece of paper and a marker. Write WHY? in big letters. Hang it above your computer monitor. Next time you’re moved to DO something, look up and see through this lens of purpose.
Are you jumping on twitter? Why? What’s the purpose and goal? Are you writing a bog post? What’s the objective and how does it fit in with your brand’s reason for being?
WHY? is the one word compass question. Follow where it leads.
WHY gives you three choices about what to DO:
- If it leads you away from what you’ve envisioned, stop. Abandon it.
- If it doesn’t move you one way or the other, set it aside.
- If it sparks acceleration toward your vision, pour gasoline on it.
Let your WHY be your guide. Once you codify the Purpose – or the WHY – of your company, you’ll be delighted at how much less do-do you have to wade through.
It’s not easy. Few will do it. No worries. That just leaves more Orange Creamsicle cake for us.
By what magnetic power can the same car be a dream come true to one customer and a rolling piece of scrap to the next? It’s called angle of approach; how you come at something. It’s how you add magnetic appeal to your marketing.
Our point of view is one angle of approach. How you present something is another. Understanding angle of approach lets you transform an every-day offer into a compelling must-have.
A used car salesman in Springfield, Vermont taught me this principle. Looking at a green AMC Gremlin on Jim’s lot, I wondered out loud who would buy such an eyesore. He flashed his used car salesman smile saying, “There’s a butt for every seat.”
But, how could angle of approach make an ugly duckling Gremlin appealing? First, let go of what you see and look through the customer’s eyes. I saw the geekiest ride ever inflicted on America’s highways. But, to a customer looking for a car to ferry family and cargo for a less than the cost of a truck, that green Gremlin was a beautiful sight.
A product or service isn’t good or bad, right or wrong; it is what it is. What separates a runaway success from so-so performance is often an intriguing angle of approach. Do it well and you can give any product magnetic appeal.
Let’s say you’re Vivitar. You have a supply of outdated point-and-shoot film cameras. They use this stuff called film. You expose it, spool it back into a canister, take it to the drug store and wait a couple hours to see your pictures.
Who wants those?
How about seniors easily frustrated by technology. What you and I see as a throw-back, a senior will see as a familiar technology they can operate. No confusing software. No tangle of cables. Best of all, you can use it again and again.
“Here’s a camera that works just like the ones you’ve used for years. Point, shoot, get prints to share. Best of all, it’s only $10—0r, two for $5.”
You think I’m kidding? Watch angle of approach at work in this ad found on Engadget:
Getting angle of approach right means seeing it from your customer’s point of view. Maybe that’s how Vivitar saw obsolete cameras as an appealing solution for seniors. You have to look at a problem from other angles; inside-out, from behind, in reverse.
Get the answers to these questions to identify an angle of approach that will move the sales needle:
A word of warning about the answers you’ll get: 1) They may not make sense to you. No big. You’re not the customer. And, 2) These answers are only the stepping off point for shaping your presentation, they’re not your marketing destination.
Shaping your marketing with an effective angle of approach magnetizes your message. You’ll know it’s working when you stop saying what’s important to you and begin speaking to the heart of what your customer truly wants.
