7 Marketing Mistakes - Mistake #6 by EmersonThoreau

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Mis t ak e #6. Spending Too Much Money on Advert is ing t hat People Do NOT Want (Rather t han on A dvert is ing t hat People DO Want .)

Let me take a moment to explain something which may save you thousands of dollars during the next few years... There are Two K inds of Advert is ing and Mark et ing. Very simply... There is advertising that people want. And there is advertising that people do not want. A dvert is ing t hat People Do NOT Want . Advertising which most people don’t want includes radio and television commercials which interrupt the programming and Dis play A dvert is ing in newspapers. The bigger ads are “Display Advertising” which are usually bought as a fraction of a page or by the “column inch.” As an advertiser, you buy an amount of space on the page in which the newspaper will “display” your ad. The other basic kind of newspaper advertising is “Classified Advertising” which is sold by the word and placed into categories: used cars, apartment rentals, yard sales, personals.

And then, some newspapers will offer to do “Inserts” for you if you have a preprinted flyer or small tabloid you want them to stick between the pages. Most people pick up a newspaper to read the news, the comics, the sports page, the obituaries, or maybe the letters to the editor. Keep this in mind: Most people do not read the entire paper. Some may page through much of the paper, glancing at the headlines but many people look only at the sections and the headlines that interest them. What about you? What sections do you read? Do you read every single page? Do you look at every single ad? Do you turn just to the sports section and the Sudoko game? Have you read a newspaper in the last 3 days? If so, what ads can your remember? While most people do not pick up the newspaper to read the big Display Ads, there are, of course, some exceptions: Some people do go out of their way to read a paper on the day the grocery stores include their sales inserts and food coupons. Yes, as a newspaper reader, you may bump into a relevant Display Ad while you’re on the same page reading an article that interests you. And, occasionally, maybe the ad even applies to your situation and catches your attention (especially if the newspaper is smart enough to place the financial-related ads on the finance page.) But the ads are basically being shoved in front of your face, interrupting your reading with hopes of hooking you into reading them. They are just another form of “interruptive” advertising. At the same time, there are probably some newspaper ads you might really be interested in reading but which, unfortunately, you never happen to see. You didn’t happen to turn to the particular page they were on; you didn’t know to look for them; you didn’t know they were there. So you missed them. So the advertiser spent all that money and still missed communicating with you. Because thousands of people may glance at the paper, a few advertisers will get a small amount of business from their newspaper ads. And because they’re so used to paid advertising not working at all, some advertisers are ecstatic if they get any sort of response from their newspaper ads (not realizing they’re getting only about “one mile-per-gallon” mileage from their advertising dollar when they could be aiming for 27 mpg.) But today, sadly, fewer and fewer people even pick up the newspaper. They’re getting their news and entertainment from the Internet on their computers or right on their SmartPhones.

What is it cos t ing you? Before you schedule a newspaper ad or radio commercial, you should figure out how many sales you need for it to bring in just to break even on the cost of the ad. For example, if you’re paying $80 each time you run a small newspaper ad, how many sales does it need to bring in just to pay for the ad? That depends partly on your profit margin on each sale. If you have a 50-percent profit margin, an $80 ad would need to bring in $160 worth of sales just to break even on paying for the ad. So before running the ad, ask yourself: Is this one ad realistically going to bring me in $160 in sales? Have you ever been brave enough to figure this out? Whether or not the ads are a good investment may depend on what you’re trying to accomplish with them. Are you trying to bring in just one new customer who, over the years, if they stick with you, may be worth a total of $2500 in profits? If that’s the case, you could justify running an $80 newspaper ad for several weeks without it making any sales at all and it would still be a good investment if it eventually brought in a good customer. However, each week you might get the same (or better) results from mailing out 80 postcards (at a cost of about $1 each) to a well-chosen list of names in your target market. While newspapers and radio may have a place in your marketing budget, they should probably demand far fewer resources than what you’re currently spending. Why? The world has changed. What worked 20 years ago (what worked even 5 years ago) simply doesn’t work today. Almost always, you can spend far less money and get a far greater and far more profitable response by shifting your ad budget over to inexpensive and cost-effective marketing strategies. That means you should be creating...

A dvert is ing t hat People DO Want . It may come as a surprise that some advertising actually pulls customers to it like a magnet. That’s because people are actually looking for it since they want what it has to sell. In this case, most of the time, they don’t even think of your message as advertising. What kind of advertising do people actually want? They want ads (or marketing messages) that help them locate whatever it is they’re looking for.

For example, to beat the crowds, they may buy the Sunday newspaper as soon as it comes out on Saturday evening so that they can go through the Classified Ads in search of an apartment or a particular used car they’re in the market for. They may be searching eBay for a specific item. Remember, eBay is nothing more than classified ads with pictures and long descriptions, conveniently arranged into categories along with a search box. If you’re searching eBay for some “snakeskin boots size 9” you’re probably not going to think of any of the 152 resulting listings as advertisements. But that’s exactly what they are. Your potential customers may be searching Google for information which helps them solve a problem (replacements for their old tires) or because they want to learn where to do something they’re interested in (hot air ballooning in Southeast Ohio.) Or because they need specific information that’s offered in a special report (like this one.) Many people also want ads that offer discounts and deals, usually in the form of coupons. In just the last couple of years, several innovative marketing channels have become available which make it easy (and inexpensive) to reach your current and potential customers with advertising that they actually want. You may want to consider these traditional and newer tools for marketing... Classified Ads. The Yellow Pages. / Trade Directories. Restaurant Guides. / Visitors Guides. Real Estate Guides. / Used Car Guides. Web Sites. Facebook Fan Pages. YouTube Videos. Opt-In Email Newsletters. Text-Messages. Telephone Seminars. Webinars. Bluetooth Proximity Marketing. Podcasts (audio reports or audio books on the web.) “Publish-on-Demand” Products (Books, Reports, Kindle Books, T-Shirts, DVDs, Posters, DVDs, CDs.) eBooks. Private Label Rights (PLR)Publications. iPhone or Android Apps.

Let ’s dis cus s jus t a few of t hes e. Webs it es are, of course, an essential component of today’s smart marketing. Yet most of your customers don’t think of your website as an advertisement at all. They may have searched Google to get to your site because they’re looking for restaurants in your town. Hopefully, you have a useful and user-friendly and beautiful website that uses your brand’s colors and type fonts and which displays your logo and your tag-line and which has a headline which talks directly to the potential client. Certainly, you (or your web designer) have taken steps to make your site easy to navigate. And it is, of course, filled with special reports (if appropriate) or short articles and maybe audio “podcasts” that your customers and prospects will find helpful. But how does your website look on an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Kindle or other handheld mobile device? Is it user-friendly? Do people have to scroll around on their tiny 3-inch screen trying to find stuff? Is your website easy to navigate on a SmartPhone? Do the videos show up at all? (Unfortunately, iPhones don’t display some videos.) Do your videos and graphics take too long to load on a mobile device so that people simply get impatient, give up, and leave your site? If you’ve never viewed your website on an iPhone, you can see (approximately) what it looks like here: http://iphonetester.com If you’re searching for restaurant information from your SmartPhone, which website would you continue browsing? The one you have to scroll left and right, up and down? Or the one designed to fit the screen?

OK, so if your site doesn’t look too good on the iPhone Tester, don’t be discouraged (probably less than 1% of all websites have been optimized for mobile devices.) I t ’s not your fault . And it’s not the fault of your webmaster. Your site was built to be seen on desktop or laptop computers. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do. This mobile revolution has taken us all by surprise. Really. The adoption of SmartPhones and other handheld mobile devices has taken place much more quickly than most of us would have imagined. This year, there have been more mobile devices sold than desktop computers. Amazon sells more Kindle electronic books than it does hardbacks. About 30 percent of Internet browsing is being done from SmartPhones instead of from computers. And, of course, the numbers are growing. Quickly! This is not news to you. You’ve known for some time that the world has suddenly gone “mobile.” Hand-held mobile devices are everywhere. People (maybe even you) are “texting” each other instead of talking on the phone. Pedestrians are wandering across your busiest intersections while surfing the web or watching a feature film on their SmartPhones. For more and more people, the only way to reach them is through that mobile device that’s tethered to them 24 hours a day. (Many people sleep next to their phones and use them as alarm clocks.) Back to the point: People actually want to visit your website and they don’t think of it as advertising. They seek it out. They search for it. That means their guard is down and they’re far more receptive to your online messages than to your traditional print ads and commercials. So it’s important not to “fumble the ball” just when you’re about to make a “touchdown” with a potential new customer. Make sure your website is “mobile friendly.” Or, better yet, rather than try to revamp your existing website (assuming it’s doing a good job,) consider building (or having built) a completely separate mobile-friendly minisite which will be seen just by those on mobile phones. Those visiting your regular website from a computer will notice nothing different. And yet, thanks to a piece of invisible “code” hidden on your website, those people using a mobile device will be sent (automatically, even before they see your regular site) to a special mobile-friendly site that you’ve created just for them. You can always give them the option of visiting your regular site on their phone if they wish. But usually, they’ll choose to

do that when they get back to their computer. I can show you how to do all this or how to get it done for you. It’s just one of the things I cover in my seminar on the smart new marketing technologies.

What All This Means t o You Is Simply This ... You need t o ret hink your ad budget and your mark et ing campaign. You may need to move your effort (and money) away from traditional advertising (which reaches out to the masses) and start focusing on ways that attract, draw in, and engage your customers in a personalized conversation. At the very least, you need to learn what’s available to you in today’s new world of smart marketing. For example, do you understand QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) and how to use them here in the physical world to send people on their SmartPhones directly over to any webpage or YouTube video you want? QR Codes . You’ve seen them around. Europe and Asia are way ahead of the U.S. in using them for just about everything. If you have a SmartPhone with a QR Code App (which may already be installed or which you can download for free off the Internet) and you take a picture of a QR Code with your camera. The QR Code can be printed on a postcard, on a table-tent, on a window sign, on a shelf label, even on your computer screen. When scanned, the QR Code will take you instantly to a website or YouTube video or it may sign the visitor up for a Text-Messaging campaign. You can make them do all kinds of things. Here’s one. Scan it right on the screen with your SmartPhone and see where it you. If you need a QR Scanner for your phone, visit GetScanLife.com

Do you know how you can build an email lis t of subscribers by using an inexpensive aut ores ponder s ervice (about $19/month) which can automate the entire process so that customers (or prospects ) can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves automatically? Once they “opt-in” to your list, you can then send them a pre-planned sequence of personalized newsletters or gentle reminders on a pre-scheduled basis without eating up lots of your time. Do you know how to build a mobile-friendly minis it e so that when people on a SmartPhone visit your regular website, it automatically sends them to the optimized minisite to deliver exactly the information they need and want? [Research conducted by Google shows that there are 3 things most people want to know when they visit your site from a mobile device. Do you know what they are?] Do you know how to set up an inexpensive t ext-mes s aging campaign wit h a cont rol panel so that you can send out short “instant messages” to your customers (with their permission) anytime you want? You can send them quotations of the day, jokes of the day, coupons, surveys, polls or aut omat ed appoint ment reminders or whatever you want (up to 150 characters per message.) Do you know how to make simple videos that you can post on YouTube to educate or motivate your current customers and to drive more visitors to your website (which helps your website’s rankings in Google)? Do you know the right way to use a Facebook Fan Page to get more local business? Do you know where to find inexpensive (or free) pre-written Privat e Label Right s articles and other content that you can revise and post on your website as a service to your customers or prospects? For example, if you have a cleaning service or a carpet cleaning agency, you might send out a text message or email to your customer list that said... “Hi. For any of you who have allergies or asthma, I’ve posted a short article on my website about which carpet-cleaning processes are best for removing allergens from your carpets. Here’s the link.” The link will take them to your (purchased) pre-written article about that topic which you’ve posted on your website. Overchoice. With so much new technology available, the choices which are now available for communicating with your customers can be overwhelming. Some are free, most are inexpensive. Keep in mind that you don’t need to use all of them. Many may not even be appropriate for you. Certainly, some will be more cost-effective than others. But you

probably do need to know a little more about each of them so that you can make an informed decision about whether or not you might use it to help build your business and increase your profits. These are things I can help you with, partly through emails (if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re on my list), partly through free seminars that I offer to small-businesses. The point is, you need to know how the smart, new, marketing opportunities can help you communicate more effectively with your current (and prospective) customers or clients so that you can be of greater service to them (which should result in an increase in your profits.) So take steps to discover the ways you can invest your time and money on advertising (and marketing) that people want.