Market your small business. Advertise your small business. Grow your small business.
Growth is what I love about advertising. It cultivates the economic environment, so businesses sell products, people have jobs, money flows through the economy, businesses generate taxes that serve society with parks, roads, schools, and first responders. Writing is the core of those advertising endeavors.
I’m typical when it comes to Ad Men, and in the past twenty-five years, words generated from my mind, through my labors, have played a role in the sale of $2.5 billion in goods and services. I didn’t do it alone, but my words acted like a bellows on the spark and gentle flame that talented, visionary entrepreneurs – like you – built. I played a role in marketing these goods and services that lead to economic activity and that is what I love doing.
The Goal is to Sell
Marketing is the occupation associated with customer acquisition. It includes direct sales, the layout of your store, pricing, presentation of the product, even the store exterior. Marketing includes research and advertising.
Advertising legend David Oglivy once said, “Advertising that doesn’t sell isn’t creative.”
Content marketing and other inbound marketing strategies, traditional advertising such as radio, TV, and print like all forms of advertising, are precisely about selling because selling is the end goal. You never want to lose sight of that simple truth. Advertising that is in love with it’s creative or content that appeals more to the search engine algorithm than the people who read it defeat the purpose of advertising
Another advertising great, Bill Bernbach said, “Advertising is fundamentally and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”
The goal is to sell. Whether you’re a clerk at a shop, a commissioned sales associate on the floor or copywriter at an ad agency, your goal is the same. Sell to customers.
No selling, no money.
Branding is what we call storytelling
For the same reason, the Hoover salesperson throws dirt on the carpet and uses the product, storytelling is the cornerstone of advertising—it’s the pitch.
It’s often said people don’t like to be sold. So, the pitch has evolved into a story that we call branding. And we frame the pitch inside a complex story that is part legend, part repetition, and host of other factors called branding that drives the creative in an advertisement. The key to good advertising is good storytelling.
Advertising or storytelling takes many forms: TV, radio, blogs, podcasts, billboards, newspapers, magazines, blogs, OTT, direct mail, email, or a good website.
Funnel Advertising
The funnel is the journey consumers take in deciding to buy. There are many forms but the one I prefer is the AIDA:
Finding the right Advertising Agency: Start with what you value
Writing is truth and truth requires a difficult process of introspection. For business, this means determining your corporate values.
Culture IQ explored their journey to discovering the company’s values in this blog post.
A few of the questions they asked were:
1. What’s important to us?
2. What brought us together and continues to hold us together?
3. What will guide us when we are facing a difficult decision?
4. What are the things you like about what we do at Culture IQ and how we do it?
5. What parts of our company are we proud of?
If you’re like me you read their blog post, looked at their questions and answered, “making money” to each question. That’s what I did. Then I worked with an ad agency that gave the client whatever they wanted. I wondered what value did they bring to the client? From that, I realized that my values include:
· We are here to address and solve the client’s marketing challenges. It’s too easy to go along. Are you providing value?
You should always value your client’s vision and insight and sometimes you go along with the client’s vision. After all they know their business better than you’ll ever know it, but if all you’re doing is parroting their concepts, you’re not providing value. They don’t need you.
After I wrote that as a core value, the rest came easy.
· Do no harm.
· We are here to listen and ask questions, not lecture.
· Be upfront and honest in all dealings.
· Be generous.
· Support collaboration.
Let’s not talk about my industry.
Let’s talk about you.
Yes, you.
Especially those with sales between $1 million and $25 million a year. You need an advertising strategy, but advertising isn’t in your wheelhouse. The most successful people in business I’ve worked with recognize this. Advertising is a huge investment; done right, the ROI is huge. You probably know this and that’s a daunting problem. Advertising and marketing are the linchpins to growing your business but because advertising isn’t in your wheelhouse you hesitate. No one wants to make a bad move. I don’t blame you because there are a lot of bad moves when looking for ways to market your business.
I’ll show you how to make the right moves and I’ll give you the secret insider information you can’t get from anywhere else. Why?
I write and produce TV commercials, explainer videos, infomercials, radio/internet audio commercials, content, press releases, live on air copy, copy for print ads, and billboards. Over the years, I’ve done work for full-service ad agencies, digital agencies, and independent businesses.
In other words, I don’t have a dog in this hunt.
Whether you manufacture something, or provide a service, or retail products others manufacture, I’ll be your guide through the dark woods of marketing and ad agencies. Your business might be entertainment or food service. Your business might be supporting other businesses; you might have a car dealership or a retail shop. No matter what your business, you want to connect your product or service—your business—to your customers, and I’ll help you do it.
Beware those who see one path
Digital marketers will always ply you with studies and stats on the strengths of digital marketing. Full-service ad agencies tend to favor traditional media because it’s a strong revenue stream. Effective marketers are going to put you first. Inbound marketing works if your story answers a question for a problem you already have. That’s probably how you found this page—you typed a question into Google.
Inbound marketing works well if you’re selling an online tool/product, or you have a service-oriented business. If you have a construction business or you’re a tax accountant, content marketing is the way to go. Push advertising or outbound marketing is effective for the problem you don’t know you have, and anyone who tells you differently is someone you want to run away from.
If you sell pizza, a strong website paired with an effective TV and radio campaign is the best approach. On weekdays, pizza is an impulse buy for those who don’t feel like cooking after a hard day at work. No one is going to search, “Fast meals for when you don’t want to cook” and then read a thoughtful blog post on the joys of delivered pizza. But if they hear an ad on the radio as they’re driving home or see a spot on the TV news when they walk in the door (and yes, plenty of people still consume these media), they’re going to go online and order. In that moment TV and radio will beat any SEO program.
Meanwhile, a car dealership needs solid content marketing focused on automobile ownership or car culture. Car care, travel, and car shows are a few workable ideas for content, a strong SEO strategy is a must, a social media presence is too, but TV and radio advertising will really drive consumers down the final leg of th buying funnel directly to your dealership as opposed to the Chevy dealer a few miles away. No one form of advertising can do the job and in this type of business — like a lot of businesses — getting the mix and balance of platforms right is the key to success.
Old timers call this a campaign, some hipsters call it alignment. Whtever, advertisers have been doing this since the years after the Civil War when the industry was invented. Car manufacturers are particularly good at this, dealerships not so much.
Those who pitch a single path are not often those who are not listening.
How to Create an Effective Story
Whether your ad is for a newspaper, a magazine, a 30-second TV commercial, a 60-second radio commercial, a blog, or a pillar page like the one you’re reading, it’s a story. And stories can be broken down into nine elements:
1. Theme – stick to one thought: a sale, a product, your move to a new location.
2. Plot – what is it you want to say about your business.
3. Setting – it could be your store, factory, or something else that grabs the consumer’s attention.
4. Character – who is this about? Your clients of course, but it could be about their customers, your products or the problem your product solves.
5. Point of View – who’s telling the story.
6. Style – short sentences or long complicated sentences?
7. Conflict – conflict might be a problem in need of a solution or a character in a radio spot asking questions and a hero giving answers.
8. Resolution – is your call to action.
All these elements play out over a story arc. A beginning (sets up the story theme, conflict, or problem), middle (the conflict plays out with solutions becoming apparent), and end (the conflict or problem is resolved).
The Ninth Rule of Storytelling
Know the rules and then break the rules. A slavish devotion to rules in storytelling is key to being dull. Yes, it’s good to have an outline and it’s good to write the introduction and conclusion after you write the body, but these are not hard fast rules.
Another rule: a writer is not a copywriter, and a copywriter is not a content writer, and a content writer is not a conversion writer, and a none of those is a screenwriter but under the right circumstances, they can be interchangeable. The key is producing a steady stream of creative. Once you learn how, creativity is a method.
