Five Rules Of Advertising
The Dynamic Manager’s Handbook Of Small Business Advertising
by Dave Donelson
Donelson SDA, Inc., Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Dave Donelson
ISBN: 978-1458188007
A note from the author
The Dynamic Manager Handbooks are for entrepreneurs, managers, and others who want to succeed in small business by learning more about management techniques, operations, and best practices. Each volume in the collection is devoted to a single topic. The material was extracted from the Dynamic Manager Guides, my series of books based on my experiences as a business journalist, consultant, and entrepreneur.
Chapter 1 - Five Rules For Advertising Success
Chapter 2 - Your Customers, Bert and Bertha
Chapter 3 - Pay Attention To Attention
Chapter 4 - Advertising’s Four-Letter Word
Chapter 5 - Just A Little Reminder
Chapter 6 - Media Buying Simplified
Chapter 1
Five Rules For Advertising Success
“You must know what matters to your customer before you can produce advertising that appeals to them.”
Effective, results-producing small business advertising isn’t impossible, it’s just hard. It’s hard to make good ads, it’s hard to buy efficient media, it’s hard to judge results. But it’s not impossible. All you need to do is follow these five simple rules.
Rule Number One - Know Your Customer
Who do you sell to most of the time? Let’s say you operate a garden center. Are your best customers apartment dwellers or home owners? Are their homes on small lots or big acreages? Are they do-it-yourselfers or do-it-with-helpers? Obviously, each of these customers needs different things from your nursery. They also need different advertising strategies for everything from copy points to media selection. You simply can’t be all things to all customers and neither can your advertising, so the first step in good marketing is to define the customer who puts the most money in your till every month.
You’ll want to know their age, sex, and income, for starters. Even more important, of course, is their housing situation, lifestyle, and family mode. You can commission expensive market research to find out these things, but you probably know much of it already from your daily dealings with them. The key is to focus your advertising on those best customers—and only them—instead of trying to be all things to all people.
Rule Number Two - Get Their Attention
We’re assaulted by literally thousands of advertising messages every day. On TV, radio, and the newspapers, to be sure. But also on every package in the supermarket, bumper stickers on almost every vehicle, and logos on a remarkable amount of clothing. They all blend together and become background noise in the life of today’s over-stimulated consumer. If your ads blend into the background, they don’t do you any good.
You’ll go a long way toward grabbing the consumer’s attention if they know you’re talking only to them, hence the emphasis on Rule One. It also helps if you have an attention-getting device, whether it be a ringing telephone that begins your radio spots or a screaming headline at the top of your newspaper ads. You have to do something to make your tree stand out from the forest.