Excerpted from McCauley's Marketing Manifesto
Section D - THE BASICS - BRANDING AND BRANDING STATEMENTS
1. You must develop your own brand.
a. Without a brand, you are dead.
2. You must develop a branding statement.
a. Without a branding statement, you are really dead.
3. Your brand and your branding statement set you apart from the ever growing crowd.
a. Having these established will make you memorable, rather than just being a memory. If you do what everyone else is doing, you will look like . . . well . . . everyone else.
4. Your brand and your branding statement must literally jump off every marketing piece or page you create.
a. The idea here is that, when your potential client or customer thinks of their needs, they immediately think of your brand.
The branding statement used by the Free Publicity Focus Group is:
Big Results. Small Investment.
There was some white space added here for impact. Simple is best. Nearly any English speaking person will get the message these words hold. (See Your Brand And Your Branding Statement located at www.freepublicitygroup.com )
Nothing more need be said.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Brand, Branding and Branding Statements
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Advertising - Should I Advertise?
Excerpted From McCauley's Marketing Manifesto
www.freepublicitygroup.com/marketing_manifesto.html
Section E - THE BASICS - ADVERTISING
1. Advertising costs money and produces fewer results
a. As a society, we have advertised ad nauseam. Though it used to work well, advertising no longer works like it used to. Advertising is an intrusive message. It interrupts rather than informs. It does not pull, it pushes. Think about those used car dealer commercials. The ones with the horns blowing and the sirens going off and the big yellow bursts on the screen or page. Most novice marketers are those type of marketers. This style of marketing requires huge numbers to be effective. You most likely do not have these kinds of numbers yet. Using this type of advertising is why advertising gets such a bad rap. It is also why people say 'I hate marketing'. This is not marketing, it is advertising. (See Section A above).
2. Publicity is free and produces greater results
a. People do not like ads. Think about this. When you pick up a newspaper, do you prefer to read the ads or the stories? When you watch television, do you jump up to make a sandwich when the show comes on so that you can get back in time for the commercials? TIVO, spam blockers, popup blockers, paid radio - the list goes on and on. The success of commercial skipping technologies is a testament to the simple fact that people dislike advertising. As a marketer, the very last thing you want is to have people fast forwarding past your message. People do not like to read ads, but they do like to read about subjects they find to be interesting. This is why content is king and why publicity works.
3. There are generally two unique categories of advertisements – ‘Awareness’ advertising and ‘Results’ advertising
a. Awareness advertising allows you to tell people you exist ‘We’ve been here for 25 years!’
b. Results advertising produces quick results - action - ‘Sale This Thursday Only!’
c. You should not totally discount advertising. It is necessary at a local level. If advertising becomes a necessary evil for you, you will most likely need to utilize both in a mix that is right for your business. Always use one or the other at any given time. Never create a message like ‘We’ve Been Here 25 Years But Will Be Out Of Business By Thursday!’ That won’t work unless you are a furniture company pretending you are going out of business - again.
4. Traditional LOCAL advertising will never disappear, but will be used far less on both the national and, in the future, at the local level
a. A recent study has shown that 50% of people now look to search engines FIRST for local and national business information, followed by 24% Yellow Pages, 4% local newspapers and 1% television. Yet only 44% of small local businesses have a website! What does this means? It means that if you are a small local business and have no website, you are virtually invisible to 50% of your potential LOCAL customers. Hmmm. Now might be a good time . . .
b. Another recent industry study shows that Boomers (who make up a huge majority of buyers now) spend 9.5 hours a day on a screen - mostly television. 77 % of this screen time occurs between 7:30pm and 11pm. 76% listen to radio. Older boomers read print. Those age 55-65 spend 100 minutes per day reading print on average, those age 45-55 spend 30 minutes per day reading print. Most of this is with their LOCAL papers - 57% read local dailies, 68% read local weeklies. This means that, if your market is LOCAL and you have a PHYSICAL business storefront, you should be using your LOCAL dailies and weeklies.
Posted by Don at Free Publicity Focus Group
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