Effective Marketing and Advertising Made Simple

It is also one which will involve weighing up options, and making an informed choice. This choice should be based on your target audience, the best vehicle for communicating with them, and factors such as budget and timescales.

The decision-making doesn’t end there though… once you have decided on the marketing medium that suits your audience and product, it’s important to recognise that even if you have an excellent means by which to advertise, your efforts will amount to nothing if you don’t have material that is appropriate and developed for maximum impact. For this reason, once you have decided on what avenue to pursue, content is your next concern. Be ready to spend time, and go through a certain degree of trial and error to ensure that when you are ready to go to ‘market,’ and to engage in marketing, that your material is designed to ‘put your best foot forward.’

Consider the following- when you first meet someone, you notice their appearance, what they say, how they act, and you respond to how they make you feel. This is no different to a marketing campaign. If you elicit a positive emotional response to the way the advert or promotion looks, what it claims, and what it evidences, then you are more likely to want the product or service in question.  In order to achieve the end outcome of converting prospects to sales, you need to tap into the wants of your customers and develop your content accordingly.

You may think that if you have the right mechanism, and the right content, then the battle is won, and this guarantees sales. Unfortunately, this is not the case… With such high levels of marketing traffic both online and offline, in order to really get ahead, you really need to be able to stand out from the crowd. You would have come across hundreds of ads that did not capture your attention, and that simply failed to interest you.  Your mission is to avoid having any of your ads fall into that category. Your campaigns need to be designed to stand out and capture attention, and thereafter to retain interest, make an impression and convert prospects to sales.

A good process to go through is to think about advertising that failed to interest you. Think of all the reasons that this may have been the case- for example, it was irrelevant or held no meaning for you, seemed boring, lacked individuality and seemed like tons you saw before , (so you assumed that the product was like a number you had seen before), or it was poorly executed and looked unprofessional.  I am certain that you can come up with a number of other reasons as well, and once you do, think of everything you can do through your marketing efforts to do the opposite.

A useful illustration of the importance of standing out and creating a positive impression is to think of salespeople that you would speak to when you are actively looking to purchase an item. You may speak to three salespeople, they may all be selling the same product and give you the same specifications, but what will get you to you from one, over the others is feeling more of a connection. If one stands out in a positive way, perhaps makes you laugh, seems to relate to you in some way, or seems to be willing to offer more of themselves than the others (i.e. this has nothing to do with the product itself, but they are willing to go the extra mile).  Your marketing is your salesforce… so you need to imbue it with the same qualities you would want your best salesperson to have.

Way too often, not enough thought it put into creating strategies and content that is truly effective. Marketing is even at times done, purely for marketing’s sake… I implore you to take a step back, take a moment to review your efforts and if necessary, to adjust them.  Aim to stand out and connect, and in the long run, your campaigns will be remembered for these reasons and will pay off in sales.