Most people want to put up ads or banners exalting their companies expertise. A lot of companies subscribe to “most bang for your buck” and want to put the declaration of independence on an add the size of a postage stamp size ad. These fallacies can cost you a lot of money and, in the end, bring little return.

Let’s cover some basic principles of advertising that will help with your ads:

1. People are walking around think about 1 person - not you.

While there is a time and place to extol your virtues, your ads are not the place. Consumers want to know what’s in it for them. Address a pain or pleasure and provide a solution for them.

2. Purchasing is an emotional decision.

If this weren’t true, credit card companies would go out of business. People respond to images and text that pull their heart strings. If you are selling widgets for kids, rather than just show the widget, show a happy child playing with the widget. this is more likely to get the parents attention. Pleasing or stirring images will catch consumers attention more than plain photos of your product and droning text about all your features and benefits. Make them comfortable with you.

3. Keep it simple

If an ad is inundated with offers and other services you provide, there will be confusion and ultimately no action will be taken. Be direct. Clever and surprising messages can be effective but not if the message is lost. Focus on one product or service. Tell them what they receive by acting now. Make this action trackable. Point them to your website for more details about you and other services you provide. You can develop a special landing page to keep track of who responds.

You need to be attuned to who your target audience is and what makes them tick. You need to know their likes and dislikes, what clubs they belong to, where they get their news, and what political and religious beliefs they adhere to. The more you know about them, the easier it is to appeal to them.

Now get out there and look good!

Chris Motley
Motley Creations

©2010 Motley Creations. All rights reserved.

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Do you spend most of your time looking for new, bigger and better clients? Are you looking in networking groups, through SEO, speaking engagements, cold calls and other avenues? Do you feel like a dog running on linoleum? A lot of movement but no progress?

While all of the above are important, I want you to consider the 80/20 rule. 80% of your time should be spent in contact with your current clients. Not only meeting their needs, but asking for referrals. Let your satisfied clients become your biggest advocates. 20% of your time can be used in finding new clients.

There is a marketing principle you should understand. Finding new clients is what’s called unknown to unknown - you don’t know them, they don’t know you. While you should spend time in this endeavor, your success rate will be much higher with known to known. That is, you know them and they know you, perhaps through one of your satisfied customers.

It could sound something like this:

YOU: Hey Joe, can I ask you why you hired us in the first place?

JOE: Your pricing was fair and you came highly recommended.

YOU: Thanks Joe. Did you receive anything from our company that surprised you? Maybe above an beyond your expectations?

JOE: I was pleasantly surprised with your responsiveness. You handled all our issues in a timely manner. I also liked how you really listened to us and focused on our needs.

YOU: Thank you Joe for the kind words. Can I ask you one final question?

JOE: Sure.

YOU: Do you know anybody who could use a highly recommended, fairly priced service like ours that listens to their clients, is focused on meeting their needs and is very responsive?

Let your client become your advocate. As a consumer, I’d rather hear your clients say you are good rather than you say it. Your chance of closing the sale goes from 10% (cold call) to anywhere from 70% to 90% with the right kind of referral.

Now get out there and look good.

Chris Motley
Motley Creations
©2009 Motley Creations. Use by permission only.

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Did you know that the major players in the market spend around a quarter of their budget on knowing who they’re talking to? Even Pepsi has a target market and it’s not, “anyone who drinks soda”. If you haven’t spent time doing it yet, you might want to determine who your target market is. Who gets your service? Who readily pays and understands the value? Who will frequent your store? You might be surprised to find out it’s not who you think.

Once you’ve established this, you need to know why people buy. It’s usually for 2 reasons: To make themselves feel better or to solve a problem. We rationalize and justify later. If this weren’t true, credit card companies would go out of business.

Now you should know who you’re talking to and the reason they buy. Let’s layout some simple rules to follow:

1. Don’t put the declaration of independence on a postage stamp: Your ad is to generate interest so that you can close the sale - it is not a list of everything you do. The more you stuff into your ad, the more confusing it is and the more it makes you look hard to work with. Choose a product or service and go with that. You can always drive them to your website to find out about the rest of your products or services.

2. Call To Action: Once you have your product or service, give your prospects a reason to call now. “mention this ad and get 25% off”, “Offer ends Sunday”, “Act now, supplies are limited”, “Call now and get a free widget”, etc - You get the picture.

3. Tracking: Develop a system for tracking the response on your ad. Put a special phone number, tell them to ask for Mr. Green (when there isn’t a Mr. Green) or point them to a special landing page on your website. The point is to make sure you know what the return is on your advertising dollar.

4. Language & Photos: Use visuals and language that your prospects respond to. Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees - we get caught up in industry terms and trying to sell the benefits we think are important. People buy for their own reasons. If you are selling a beverage to men, you might use images of single women and talk about how it tastes. If you are selling to women, you might use couples and speak to less calories. You have to like your advertising but your prospects must love it.

Now get out there and look good.

Chris Motley
Motley Creations

©2008 Motley Creations. Use by permission only.

Tags: Advertising, budget, call to action, tracking.

So you spent a thousand dollars on a full page color ad in a local magazine. The salesman said it would be seen by just the people you’re looking for. He guaranteed thousands of people would see it on a daily basis. He said your phone would be ringing off the hook. Now you run a second ad in another publication. You seem to be getting some new clients but how can you be sure which ad is bringing them in? Can you really tell what your return is on these investments?

The answer is an unequivocal YES - there are several ways from the inexpensive to the fully automated (and costly). As I’ve said before, you are going to make mistakes in marketing. The key is not to make them twice. Thanks to technology, you can have the answers you need.

First, the inexpensive. Let’s say you have 2 ads running. Let’s also assume you have a phone system with up to 4 lines. Each one of those lines is a roll over line with it’s own number or 800 numbers. One way to measure is to put a different phone number on each of your ads - one of your roll over lines. Then you check on your phone records for direct dials to that line. But be patient. One week is not enough to see real results. Some studies show that people need to see your ad up to 20 times before responding to it.

Another inexpensive way is to buy a few clever URL’s (www.NoMoreClogs.com). Short and clever are best. At a cost of $8 a year, you can afford to experiment. Then you simply build a landing page that resides with your normal website and point the URL to it. Add Google Analytics (for free) and point your different ads to different URL’s. They can all be connected to your website, you need not have a separate hosting account for each and you can put all of your contact information as well as special offers and calls to action. At the end of the month, you’ll be able to see just how much direct traffic you received.

If your budget will allow, there are service providers out there that for around $300 a month, will set you up with phone numbers for each ad, route calls through their server, tell you what the result of the call was (connected, busy, abandoned or no answer) and even tell you who it was that called so you can call them back. They can do some truly amazing things. They can tell you the number of leads, average call duration, give you a cost per lead and assign a percentage based on overall advertising. Some will record the calls and even offer training for your staff. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

Technology exists now to let you know exactly where your best dollars are spent. You will be able to do the math quarterly and make educated choices as to where to keep spending your money and, more importantly, where to stop spending it.

Now get out there and look good.

Chris Motley
Motley Creations

©2008 Motley Creations. Use by permission only.

Tags: Advertising, analytics, Marketing, technology, tracking.

Business owners have a tendency to want to market to anyone with a wallet. This is called “shotgun marketing” and it’s pretty ineffectual and expensive. Even Pepsi has a specific demographic they go after. It helps define their brand image, brings clarity to their message and helps to establish what media to use.

Take a long look at your client list. You’ll notice that some clients bring steady revenue, some bring large one-off payments and some might even cost more to service than you earn. We’ll start with categorizing them in 2 basic groups: Win/Win and Win/Lose, where in Win/Win it means a “Win” for the client and a “Win” for you. In the second category, Win/Lose, we put the clients that keep you on the phone a lot, always need hand holding, require constant “tweaks” or just generally take up much of your time - remember, your time is worth money. So it might be a “Win” for the client but not necessarily a “Win” for you.

Once you have your 2 lists, you need to look for any similarities. Are they in the same industry, same age group or same sex? Do they have 5 or less employees, are they proficient with technology, or are they penny pinchers? Are they a generation that didn’t grow up with technology, are they more artsy types, or do they pay close attention to detail? Also look at the type of work you do for your clients in each category. Some work may have a big payday but sometimes slow and steady wins the race. Depending on your industry, you will see patterns that may surprise you. It will be easier than you think to find the similarities.

Once you have the similarities of the Win/Win group, now you can start brainstorming people, industries and finally companies that you feel are comparable. Make a long laundry list and then do your research. Look at these companies on the internet, request a media kit, do an anonymous phone interview or ask colleagues in their industry. Make sure they are in need of your product or service.

I have built my Win/Win profile, input the industry type and a few other parameters into a list service like infoUSA and come back with as many as 50 companies. I then discarded about half as a “no fit” right off the top. Then I did my research online and through reputable sources and came up with a short list of about 5 “good fits” and a like number of “maybes”.

Now you can go out and network in the community - find out who knows who. Once you have an inside contact from a qualified source, then you need to have good materials such as a capabilities study and some good people skills to get in and build the relationship. Remember, it’s easier working from the top down than the bottom up. Just walking in the front door of a company doesn’t have a great closing rate. There is truth to the idea that it’s not what you know but who you know.

By the same token, from the Win/Lose list, you will start to see the type of clients you have that aren’t so profitable. You can use this to be more selective in the future about what accounts you go after. I choose to have alternate solutions for those clients that aren’t necessarily a good fit for my company. I always want to offer a prospect a good solution for their needs. In my case, it might be a freelance artist I know and trust who doesn’t have the overhead that my company does. In that way, I turn a Win/Lose into a Win/Win. And who knows? Maybe they will come back someday and be a good fit.

Now get out there and look good!

Chris Motley
Motley Creations
©2008 Motley Creations

Tags: demographic, network, targeting.

Have you ever spent a few thousand dollars for an ad in a newspaper that ran for a week and received one call - maybe? You’re not alone.

I’m not saying don’t advertise in the paper - it’s a useful tool and sometimes necessary depending on your industry. I’m saying there is a powerful, trackable tool you can use to get to the people who are looking for your product or service. That tool is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - otherwise known as pay per click campaigns. When going to Google, Yahoo, or MSN, you’ll notice the “sponsored links” on the right side of the page and sometimes at the top - these ads are pay per click campaigns.

In a nutshell, you choose the keywords that your prospects use when searching for you in search engines, set a budget as to how much you’re willing to invest and choose which area you want to advertise. Then you wind up and let it go - while tracking your results on-line. You can potentially get an astronomical increase of return on your investment for the same money. As with any media, there are no sure things.

First, the keywords: Google and several other sites will provide a tool to get a list of keywords they recommend for your site such as:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

Once you have the words, it’s important to notice that each word has a “bid” price. In other words, what a company is willing to pay when someone clicks on that link. Some are relatively inexpensive and some are very expensive. So you need to do your research. What you don’t want is to pay for people clicking into your site and finding out it’s not the right fit for what they were looking for.

Next you set your budget. You can itemize how much you are willing to pay for a click and how much you are willing to spend a day and a month. Once you reach your limit, your ad stops showing up.

Lastly you need to establish where you want your ads to show. If your product or service has a limited region you can service, it makes since to only advertise in those regions. You can set it by cities, regions, countries, or even a set distance from your store.

There are several other factors not covered here as I would have to write a book to even scratch the surface. Some of those things are; Am I in an industry that would benefit from SEM? Is it better for me to pay a service to manage my account? Will driving traffic to my website ultimately achieve my goals (such as bring people to my store)?

Do your homework before you begin. Your time is valuable and some things are just better left to the experts. I know how to change the transmission fluid in my car but I’m not about to do it. What would take me hours will take the person with the right tools and experience only minutes.

Now get out there and look good.

Chris Motley
Motley Creations

©2007 Motley Creations. Use by premission only.

Tags: Advertising, budget, Pay Per Click, search engine marketing.