The previous post on controlling costs reminded me of a famous quote:
“The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory.”
– Aldo Gucci
The money you spend on your advertising and marketing is not an expense, it’s an investment that you are counting on to bring a return. If you are looking for a financial advisor, your first concern is their track record; their fees only really come into play when comparing the similar track records of different advisors. However, when many small businesses look for help with their advertising and marketing, they look at fees first and often never make track record a concern.
The only good advertising is effective advertising. Anything else is a loss. Be aware of fees and certainly count their cost, but don’t think of your advertising as a commodity that is bought based on price alone. You’ll sure to have a bitter experience if you do.
If you taken the advice found here in this blog, you’re probably already pretty far into the process of planning and implementing your marketing and advertising strategies. If you haven’t started, I’d like to give you one good reason why you should start today. The reason is this: the sooner you start, the less it will cost. Let’s take a look at why that is.
Planning and preparation are the key to containing the cost of any project. The same holds true for advertising and marketing.
Marketing and advertising are collaborative endeavors. You’ll need to collaborate with someone else to fulfill your advertising and marketing. That someone else may be a graphic designer, a web expert, a copywriter, a production company, or it may be the newspaper or radio station that is running your ad, but you will be enlisting someone else’s help at some point in order to implement and fulfill your marketing or advertising.
What does this collaboration have to do with planning, preparation, and controlling costs? Glad you asked! What this means is that you will need to give your collaborators, the people you are working with to implement your promotional strategies, time to to plan and prepare your ads, web sites, or media plans. The less time you give them, the higher your costs will be. Let me illustrate.
Whenever you are buying something, be it shoes, furniture or whatever, there are three features you that you want: you want it to be of high quality, you want it quickly, and you want it to be as inexpensive as possible. Now if you are dealing with a commodity, all three of those things may be possible. But marketing and advertising are not a commodity, they are custom-created for your product or service. You can’t pick an ad off the rack and run it, you must have something custom-tailored to your specific needs. Since marketing and advertising are essentially custom items, it means that you can’t have all three of our desired features. Looking at the three features, high quality, quick, and inexpensive, you can only have two.
You can have fantastic quality and get it quick, but it won’t be inexpensive. The reason is that all the planning, preparation and effort that your custom solution requires must be compressed into a short time frame. For your collaborator, that means long hours with few breaks, overtime charges, and giving other client’s projects a push to accommodate your project. Those other clients won’t like the delay in their schedules, and the only thing that makes risking their displeasure worthwhile is the higher rate you’ll be paying to expedite your project. High quality, quick turnaround, but expensive.
If you wait until Thanksgiving to plan your Christmas advertising and you want great results, this is where you’ll find yourself.
Or, you can have your marketing or advertising implemented quickly and inexpensively, but it won’t be of high quality. All products or services take a certain amount of time to complete, and custom items that cannot be mass produced take even more time. Your ads or media plans will take time to put together. The only way to push it out the door quickly without added expense is to cut corners on the quality. Fast and inexpensive, but it will be neither fantastic nor effective.
This is what most small businesses settle for in their advertising and marketing. They wait until the last minute, then rush through a half-thought out media buy, create a half-baked ad, and come away wondering why their advertising didn’t give them the results they were expecting. The money they spent on advertising ends up being a complete and expensive loss.
However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
You can get high quality and have it relatively inexpensive. The key is to give your collaborators the time to do their thing. When your ad executive, graphic designer, or copywriter are given the time it takes to put together a high-quality, fantastic campaign, you won’t incur overtime charges and rush fees. You’ll get to hear the reasons for their choices and the justifications for their recommendations, and you’ll have the time to think those things over to see if they truly accomplish the goals you have set for your advertising and marketing. Fantastic and inexpensive, but it won’t be quick.
Start now, so you and your marketing and advertising partners will have the necessary time to plan and implement your creative and media planning. You’ll be far better pleased with the results.
This is the first week of August, and this week is nearly over. By the end of this month, school will have started in most places. That’s only about three weeks from now. Right on the heels of school starting is the Labor Day weekend. Yep, September is upon us. Then in quick succession is Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. For almost everybody, things really pick up in the fall.
If you haven’t started planning your promotions for the fall, you’d better start now. Do you know your message? It had better not be “we’re having a sale” because everyone will be having a sale. Have you thought about where you’ll proclaim your message? You’ve only got three weeks left of summer. If you don’t start planning now, then you’ll be stuck doing whatever can be done at a moments notice, and you’ll probably be disappointed with the results.
I read a post at LogoDesignLove that got me to thinking about logos and branding, as well as marketing and advertising in general. This particular post was about how the logo of a 150 year old French furniture manufacturer has evolved over the years. What’s interesting to me is that the logo history only goes back to the 1930′s. Isn’t a logo essential to managing a business’s brand? What did they do for the previous 70 or 80 years?
It’s possible they had a mark that was used before that time but it was not provided to the blog’s author. But assuming the history is correct, how did they build their business without our modern brand management? I can tell you how. They did it by maintaining a great reputation.
In all the marketing-speak that is tossed at small businesses, what sometimes gets lost is that all your marketing and advertising efforts are moot if you don’t offer a great product or service. It starts there; that’s the foundation. Built on top of that foundation is the experience your customers have when they deal with you. When you offer a great product or service along with a pleasurable experience for your customer, you have a great brand.
“Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.”
–Proverbs 22:29
A brand is far more than a logo or the name of a company or product. A brand is the reputation that precedes your company prior to a customer doing any business with you. A great ad for a bad product, or great marketing for a business that doesn’t respect its customers, is like putting whipped cream on an onion. You might fool people once with your shiny logo and slick ads, but you’ll still leave a bad taste in their mouth.
A week ago, I read this post by Seth Godin about betting on smarter customers. I was very encouraged.
You see, I started this blog so small business owners would have a source of free information to help them with their marketing and advertising decisions, and a very smart guy confirms that the idea is a good one. (By the way, if you own a business and you don’t read Seth’s Blog, you should.)
Today, this worthwhile advertising blog turns 6 weeks old. Because it’s still in its infancy, you’ll see a lot of changes as it grows. But I promise you that I’ll keep posting useful content.
To the more than 200 people that have stopped by in the past 42 days, thank you. I hope you find the information helpful.
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