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When putting together an advertising or promotion campaign, one of the major decisions before you is how to get your message out. The options for promoting your message are many: traditional media (tv, radio, print), online advertising, social media, direct mail, sales promotions, sponsorships, public relations, events and trade shows, merchandising, and actual sales efforts. Enough choices to make you cross eyed. And broke.
Small businesses tend to focus on traditional mass media because it’s what we as individuals know best. We think: people still talk about last year’s Super Bowl commercials and nobody even remembers the direct mail piece they received yesterday, so TV must be king.
The trouble is that mass=money, so most businesses either opt to do nothing or opt to take out a second on their house, neither of which are good—or necessary—options.The key is to figure out with whom you are hoping to communicate, and then determine the best way to start a conversation with them.
If you’re McDonald’s and your market is, say, 90% of the population and you need to make several thousand sales per minute, then mass advertising, like a run-of-network TV campaign across the entire US, is spot on (no pun intended!).
But say your prospects are people in Northeast Louisiana with a liquid net worth of $250,000 or more. That list quickly boils down to about 5,000 households. Then let’s say you really only want to do business with people in Ruston, LA. Now you’re talking about 750 households. Still a decent sized prospect pool, but say you only really need to gain one new customers per week out of that pool. Now we’re definitely not going to be able to justify the price of TV, even on the local networks.
Depending on the product/service being sold in the above scenario I’d mostly likely recommend personal (direct) selling, but let’s say that’s not possible for some reason (or maybe you HATE direct sales as much as most every breathing human out there does). Then I’d probably recommend direct mail (DM).
I love DM because of how well you can target it. Still, the typical response rate on most DM is something like 2%. But, if you mix it up and add well placed outdoor or radio advertising to a three-piece DM campaign, then you might be able to ramp up the response rate. Season in a little social media for brand recognition and we might be talking a great campaign.
Ok, so, I can go on and on with examples. Frankly, sometimes you need a chainsaw and other times you can use a scalpel. The concept I’m trying to hammer into your head is that not every channel works for every situation. The right channel depends on your target market and your goal.
Putting a little effort into defining your “who” and “what” will make figuring out the “how” much easier (and probably more economical to boot!).
~Sarah, Emogen marketer
