Tough times call for sharp marketing strategy

Bill Welch

03/12/2011

Like him or not, Richard Nixon had a favorite saying that is great advice for businesspeople: When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
The business climate has certainly been tough the last few years, especially in Rhode Island, and doesn’t show signs of improving significantly anytime soon.
This leaves business owners with a choice: hunker down and wait for their business to rebound when the economy does or increase sales by marketing smarter.
Successful businesspeople I know are in the latter camp. If you’d like to join them, here are some tips that will make your marketing much more powerful. These are things I learned during a more than 35-year marketing career, more than half of it in the big leagues on Madison Avenue.
• Get your message right: The most important principle in marketing is this: Nothing interests human beings more than themselves. So your marketing (website, e-mails, ads, publicity, direct mail, whatever) is most effective when it makes clear how your product and/or service can solve someone’s problem or improve their lives. Marketers who brag and boast about themselves waste their time and money. Successful marketing is all about connecting with your customers’ wants and needs. Do that and sales growth will follow.
Part of getting your message right is positioning yourself as better to do business with than your competition. If you don’t, what incentive do people have to choose you over them? To generate sales, your marketing has to communicate convincingly the special benefits of doing business with you. Greater selection, more experience, better warranty, convenient location(s), whatever positions you as superior to your prospective customers’ other choices. Notice I didn’t include “lowest price.” That’s risky positioning. In most cases, competitors can undercut your price, you reduce your profit and price buyers don’t become loyal customers. • Grab them with your headline: Ads, direct mail, marketing e-mails, flyers, brochures – all have or should have headlines. A huge mistake most inexperienced marketers make is using the name of their business in place of a real headline. To be effective a headline must quickly capture reader attention by saying something provocative. If it doesn’t, readers move on without ever getting your message. A company’s name used as a headline says nothing. Marketing pieces that lead with the company’s name are a waste of money.
The most effective headlines are generally brief, clever, fresh and tie into the reader’s wants and/or needs.
• Appeal to emotion when you can: Emotion is generally a stronger motivator than logic. Clothing is marketed on the promise of how it will make the wearer look and feel, rather than on value or the quality of the fabric or tailoring. Homes are often sold more on the cachet of the address and visual appeal than on the soundness of construction.
• Harness the power of photographs: A good photograph is worth way more than 1,000 words. Photos naturally draw the reader’s eye much more than text does. Take advantage of this by using good photography in your marketing. Try for fresh compositions, unusual angles, surprising content, pictures that tell a story. This will probably mean paying a professional. But the return on investment for an effective photo can be greater than a free one that’s boring.
How many hundreds or thousands of times have you seen the photo of some people standing uncomfortably with a huge check. The event is laudable: an organization is giving someone a donation. But the photo is a boring cliché, drawing far less reader attention than a more imaginative picture would have. One reason good photography is so effective in marketing these days is that there is relatively little of it. Good photography requires talent and experience. The ease and low cost of digital has resulted in an awful lot do-it-yourself commercial photography that does nothing for the marketing effort.
A great but largely overlooked place to make sales points is in photo captions. People are drawn to photos, then to captions. So use each photo as an opportunity to make one or more key sales points, which if cleverly done don’t even have to relate directly to the photo.
• Hone your home page: The first thing visitors see, your home page is where your website succeeds or fails.
With briefest possible text and sometimes photos and illustrations, your home page has to make three things clear:
• The products and/or services you provide. This must be done in terms of customer-focused features and benefits.
• Why your company is the best place to buy those products or services.
• The customer profiles you specialize in.
• Persuade with testimonials: It isn’t believable when you brag about yourself. That’s where testimonials come in. Customers can more credibly testify to your reliability, on-time performance, quality, outstanding service and the like.
Don’t do a whole page of lengthy testimonials. No one will read it. Instead sprinkle brief ones throughout your website.
From my many years working with all sorts of businesses large and small, here’s the best piece of advice I can give you: Don’t give up. Perseverance is by far the most important ingredient for success. •

Bill Welch has 40 years of marketing consulting experience. His clients range from Fortune 500 corporations to startups in all sorts of industries. He can be reached at WelchInc@aol.com.

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