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This post deals mainly with:
- marketing
One of the most difficult for people to get used to is the
fact that they do not get any return on their advertising
bucks.
When you start testing advertising and marketing done the
emotional response way, you’ll have to decide whether
advertising and marketing campaigns you start and test are
working well enough to continue.
All the biggest myths about advertising and marketing that
are professed by all the so called “gurus” is that there is
an cumulative effect of marketing and advertising. That
“name recognition” builds from this cumulative effect and
eventually results in business.
Image marketing can and does work in very limited
circumstances. Those circumstances are strictly in
situations where someone has so much money and so much time
that they can afford to build name recognition that
eventually leads to a large and successful business.
For example, we all know McDonald’s and Coca Cola, and
we’ve all seen the polar bears and the Golden Arches. We
know about those products as things implanted in our
brains. Keep in mind though, that Coke and McDonald’s spend
literally millions and millions of dollars a year to get
and keep that kind of name recognition.’
In a lot of businesses, while some large companies do have name
recognition, there is not always a so-called “taste” as
there is with Coke or McDonald’s. People go to buy those
products and eat or drink them because they like the way
they taste. They do not go just because they recognize the
name.
Now keep in mind a very, very important difference between
these types of products and a lot of other kinds of services.
In services, nobody knows what you taste like, or whether
one office of “Great way Brokers” is better than “Smart
Financial Services”.
Why? Because plenty of services are highly personal. They
require making personal connections. “Name recognition”
wo not help you a bit if your advertising is not seen by
anybody because it’s boring and uninteresting.
The cumulative effect and measuring the success of your
marketing clearly presents when you want to do any direct
marketing project, it either works well right away, or it
doesn’t. Occasionally, you have a mediocre result that can
be tweaked and improved. Normally you know instantly
whether your advertising and marketing is working.
Let’s say for example you were in sales and you decided to
run an ad in your local paper for USD 40. After two hours you
receive eight leads who leave their name and address in
your Voice Mailbox. Now, using a ballpark of USD 10/lead as
the maximum acceptable cost for any type of marketing or
advertising campaign, you can get an idea of whether your
promotion is in the ballpark or not.
With this USD 40 ad divided into 8 leads, you’re paying USD 5 a
lead. Which is certainly an acceptable cost per lead. This
sort of cost-per-lead range will end up being very
productive and successful for you as you move through the
testing and increase the frequency and size of your ads.
But, if you ran the same USD 40 ad and only got two responses,
you’re at USD 20 a lead. That tells you that the ad probably
either A) has the wrong headline, B) is in the wrong place
in the paper, C) is in the wrong publication altogether, or
D) is in the wrong time of the week or days, or any
combination of the above variables.
This would work the same way if you were in the retail
business. Instead of getting leads you would get customers.
Would not it be better to get 8 customers to respond to you
rather than 2 customers? The ad cost the same no matter
what your response is, however the bottom line on your
business makes it an huge difference.
To be honest with you, even though you can take educated
guesses and get pretty good at figuring things out over
time, as you get more experienced in response marketing,
you still never know exactly why a particular campaign does
or does not work. All you know is either A) it does, or B)
it doesn’t.
By Abe Cherian
Copyright 2005
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Posted in Marketing |