Your Message: An overview of advertising in today’s market

Your Message: An overview of advertising in today’s market

Your market has changed more in the last five years than it had in the previous twenty, at the very least your clients have. They are more savvy, more experienced, more educated and more callous than generations past and this trend will only continue to develop. They will TiVo your television commercials, skip stations away from your radio ads and turn the page on your magazine ads after only a glance. Does this mean that traditional advertising has lost its effectiveness?... Certainly not. In fact one could argue that poorly done advertising has dramatically enhanced the effectiveness of well done campaigns. For example, some estimates say that as much as 40% of all Super Bowl viewers are watching only to see the commercials. Americans are not turned off by advertising. We are turned off by poorly done or irrelevant advertising. These market conditions mean that you can’t expect them to eat any old sugar covered cheese sandwich that you offer them. It means you must give them a message that is relevant to them, in a way that they can understand. You must say it more than once and you must say it in a way that is pleasant or attractive to them. This is an overview of how to do just that.

1. Target your message by matching your clients to your services

Before you are ready to design your advertising campaign strategy, you must define your message. The only way to know what message will be both real and effective for your clients is to understand your client and their relationship with you AND your business. There are several ways to get to know your clients better, and usually the better ones are the simpler ones. You can, and occasionally should, spend some money on outsourced surveys and demographic research. However, one of the best ways to get to know your clients and how they use your services is to informally speak with your front line employees about their experiences with your customers… both good and bad.

Once you have a specific understanding of who your clients are, what they are looking for and how they actually use your services you’ll be able to compare your offerings with their demands. This is crucial, not only for the construction of an effective message, but also to understand whether or not you are meeting client expectations and how to improve their experience with you. In researching your clientele you may uncover the need to alter your services. If this is the case, alterations should be complete by the time your campaign is getting under way. After all, how can your business support an onslaught of new clients if your current services aren’t satisfying the clients you already have?

Now you’re ready to construct your message. Use your knowledge of your clients and how they use your services to describe to new clients how your services can benefit them, in particular. That is your message.

This message can take days of brainstorming, discussing, contemplating and in some cases heated discussion in the effort to make sure your message is correct for your individual business and will prove to be effective. It is a small expense in emotion and time to make the best choice and it will pay off many fold if you have a good follow through. This message should be a short, pointed, honest statement made using words and principles that are especially relevant to your clients. Remember, your message is for your clients. That doesn’t mean to make it so technical that only your clients can understand it. That means to talk to them like they talk. In many cases, an effective message is one highly charged word or concept.

For example, some vacation campaigners use the concept of ‘peace’ or ‘rest’ to appeal to professionals in high stress or high activity professions. This ‘keep it simple’ concept is fundamental in your clients understanding of your message, but it also forces you to fully understand what your client is buying. In neither example above would the client be buying a vacation. They would be buying peace and emotional revitalization or simple physical rest. You have now decided on something that your client can understand and something that will improve your relationship with them. Since you have a better understanding of what they are buying from you, you have a much better knowledge of how to serve them.

At this point you should have, for your efforts, a word or phrase that can fit on a post-it note and will define your immediate future with your clients.

2. Design an Ad Campaign to deliver your message

First, please realize that your clients are swamped with ad everyday. If you feel that you can reach them with one ad or even one repetitious cycle of the same ad, you have probably underestimated their busyness and overestimated the power of your message. If you want to attract new relational customers on a large scale, be prepared to launch an ad campaign. In most cases that means several different ads in several different types of media. What will define the extent of your campaign are your goals for it. An ad campaign with no defined set of goals or objectives is a ship with no compass. So, you will need to get with your managerial team and your marketing dept. and define your desired results. Decide and agree on what you want this campaign to do. That will make its chances of success much greater and will also make many of your up-coming choices for you.

Now you know who your client is, what you want to tell them and how you want them to react. The next step is to define the “texture” of your campaign. By that I mean it is time to decide what you want your campaign’s presentation to be like. Do you want soft and warm or modern and edgy. The choices are as limitless as your imagination and this stage can be intimidating and easily befuddled. That is also why the previous stages are so crucial. If you don’t have the direction gained from the previous steps, you may find yourself making wild guesses as to how to finish the project. A lot of time and money has also probably been spent by this point, so there is some risk involved… but don’t let it intimidate you! Stick to what you know and what you have decided. Here’s how you do it…

Use your message to define a hook (technically referred to as an Associative Recall Cue.) This ‘hook’ is something your client can associate with, on an emotional level. For example, if your message is peace then using words or pictures of something your client thinks is peaceful will allow him / her to associate with your message on an emotional level. This hook can be funny, sad, cynical or anything really. Its nature is defined by your client, not by what you like. If your client can not associate with the images or words you’re showing him, then he probably won’t understand your message either. He definitely won’t remember it. That’s why accuracy in knowing your client (from the first section) is so crucial.

Besides association with your client being the correct way to deliver your message, if you base campaign ‘texture’ decisions on your client’s needs as opposed to your own taste, your detail decisions will be easier and it will be easier to get the whole thing through the board room. So, use your message and the needs of your clients to determine an emotional hook. That will define the “texture” of your campaign. See, it’s easy.

Remember, a campaign will most likely deal with different ads in different media. Try to keep the larger picture in mind when structuring your campaign so that all the different gears, if you will, work to together to move your machine in the same direction.

Now you are ready to determine and assess your budget. If the strategy you have constructed will cost more than can be allotted, you may have to either cut some of the less crucial parts or find cheaper, alternative ways to accomplish your goals. (I’m seeing some funny looks in the crowd…) Yes, budget comes after strategy. Determining a budget for something that you haven’t yet defined would be like buying a large tract of commercial property before you knew what you were going to do with it. Please, keep an open mind. I’m not suggesting you let a bunch of marketing yay-whos run wildly away with your budget. Not one unapproved penny should be spent, but putting those kinds of requirements or limitations on your marketing dept.’s creativity is hendering their talents and inspirations, besides risking the integrity of your message. First figure out the best way to accomplish your goals and then figure out a way to make it happen.

3. Designing your ads – the components of your campaign

This is the point where the campaign will be given to an off site agency or designer. Or if it is the case, sent to your in-house layout dept. Whichever of these you will be doing, there are some things to keep in mind about ad design from your perspective.
First and foremost, the agency / designer should understand your emotional hook. The more they understand (and even believe in) your campaign, the more impassioned their work will be. There are some advertisers that actually pitch their message to their designer. Some trade services as part of the payment for the ad. The whole point is for the designer to feel what you feel. If the designer feels what you feel, he can make your clients feel like you feel. That’s what he does and that’s what you want.

When it is given out to be designed… let the designers do their job. You have done your job by giving the agency / designer a well developed project that should be easy to turn into a great success. Micromanaging anything, in some general terms, never works but it can be worse for you here. The agency / designer knows how to use colors and shapes to produce the response that they understand you want. If they are not capable of this, then you may want to consider finding a new design resource. If you try to over-communicate your picture to them, your message may end up muddled or misconstrued and in all honesty the difference that ‘a little bluer blue’ or ‘can you move that about a quarter inch to the right’ will make in how many clients the ad attracts is 0. If your message is good and delivered in a functioning package, then it will work. If your message is irrelevant or poorly communicated, no amount of ad tweaking will save it. Besides, your company has paid them good money to produce a quality product, let them earn it.

There are a few more concepts that will help your individual parts perform better.

Remember that all the separate ads should function as a single vehicle. For example, your print ads should contain keywords that are also keywords on your website’s landing pages. That way, if your ad is relevant to them, when they go to look for you on the internet the search engines will help them find you… even if they don’t remember your company name or brand.

Stick to your message. It’s easy to get distracted with catchy but irrelevant phrases. They will only confuse your message. Rely on your emotional hook to associate with your clients, not extra verbiage. Too much verbiage is distracting and often construed as a sure sign of a sugar coated cheese sandwich.

Your clients are bombarded with ad daily; they will not remember you or your service after seeing only one ad. Also, don’t treat a campaign like a “bunch of ads”. To be effective, all your different ads and media platforms should work together to deliver the same message to the same client. Don’t give up easily, remember you are pursuing relational customers and they will show you the same devotion that they are showing to the business that they are buying from now. I.E. repetition is indispensable.

Don’t get personal about your ads. One of the most important things for a business owner to understand about advertising is that the ads are not for you! They are for your client and should be spoken in your client’s language.

In conclusion, we can say that advertising is growing in a way that is similar to the way the rest of commerce is growing. Business machines are smarter than they ever have been. Consumers are smarter than they have ever been. Software is more intuitive than it has ever been. Markets are more intuitive than they have ever been. The basic concepts that will bring you success in advertising are the same concepts that will help you succeed in cyber-space: Real content – real quality – real products that produce real results, and the ones that they were advertised to produce – in short… honesty about who you are and how that can benefit your individual clients.

A special thanks to Mr. Roy H. William, the Wizard of Ads. He has been a great source of both inspiration and understanding for me. If you haven’t attended one of Mr. William’s seminars, you should seriously consider it.