Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

As a follow-on to my post yesterday about Amazon and advertising…

Often when non-marketers see “marketing” in my title, they jump right to questions about advertising. They’ve dropped a bundle and it’s not working; they’ve been promised great things by an ad salesperson; they just don’t know where to start (or if they should.) If they’re a small biz or start-up, I often tell them advertising is probably not their best tactic (costs a lot of money and takes time to produce results…if it ever does…)

And, now I can also point them to this post by Seth Godin. Your Ads Are Not For You

Here’s the puzzling math of advertising, offline and on:

* Everybody doesn’t read, remember or click on your ads.
* Nobody isn’t the right answer either.

In other words, you don’t get 100% attention when you buy an ad. In fact, you don’t 50% attention or even 1%. If you’re very very good and very lucky, it might be .1% but it’s more likely to be one in 10,000. Which is exactly the right number, it turns out, to make advertising work…

Anyway, stop advertising to yourself. You’re already sold. You’re not the target market.

I’d add that what you like (in product features, brochures, web sites, or ads) may well not be what your target market likes (or loves.) For example, if you like to read lots of tech detail…and your target customer doesn’t…well, don’t bombard him or her with the stuff. (Different personalities have different buy buttons, duh-oh!) I see this mistake a lot in techie start-ups. The head guy wants to give customers lots of deep, “just the facts, m’am” details…and the customer simply want to know how is it going to help me now (and can I get a live person on the phone when I need help)? In the nonprofit world, bombarding people with tons of heart-rending data is also a waste of time. Just because you’re passionate about the cause doesn’t mean your target donor is…they can’t get their heads around “ending world hunger” – they can get excited about saving one child.

And so it goes – in marketing anything we’ve got to remember “they” ain’t “us.”

Related Posts:
The All-Knowing, All-Seeing “I”
Advertising: Creative or Effective?

Tags: marketing, marketing troubleshooting, advertising, small business marketing, entrepreneur sanity check