Trigger Marketing

Three ways to break through

50%, really? That’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true.

If you’re like most small business owners, you’re spending at least some of your advertising budget on mass media like newspaper, radio or flyers. Now let’s look at why you may be wasting your money.

Three reasons:
1. Targeting the wrong people
2. Your message is not relevant to your audience
3. Not enough frequency

Targeting the wrong people

When you look at who your customers are, you’ll find some commonalities. I promise you, your customers are not “everyone”. Your customers will fall into groups or segments that will have common demographic, psychographic and even geographic characteristics. So when you advertise in “mass media” that’s just what you’re doing, you’re advertising to the masses – to everyone. What happens is a large percentage of your advertising is targeting the wrong people, therefore it’s wasted.

Unless you’re selling something that a large majority of the market needs, like groceries, mass media has a lot of waste built in. In order to have mass media work for you, you will need to have a significant amount of frequency

Not being relevant

If you are in the market for a car, you will start to notice automotive advertising. If you need a new cell phone, you’ll notice cell phone ads. This is how the human mind works. Each of us is exposed to over 2,000 promotional messages a day. Think about that – TV, radio, internet, billboards and more all competing to get our attention. What do we notice, or let it? Only what is relevant to our live at that moment.

Your customers are the same. When you put a message in front of them, make sure it speaks to what they feel is important. If you don’t know what your customers feel is important, ask them.

You’re competing with a lot of noise, if you want to get noticed and remembered you need to be relevant, but you also need one more thing.

Frequency

You need to keep your message in front of your customer on a regular and consistent basis. This may appear to be a contradiction, because I just finished telling you each of us is exposed to over 2,000 messages a day and that we block out most of them. So how can increasing the amount of noise help?

You need to be there when you’re customer is ready to buy. Your customers don’t all buy from you on the same day of the year. They probably buy from you all year long. You need to be the first one they think of when they need what you sell.

These are the three keys to better and less wasteful advertising.
1. Target the right people
2. Tell customers what’s in it for them
3. Keep your message in front of them consistently

Follow this advice and you’ll see better results.

To learn more, download our free eBook "Seat of your pants marketing - The 10 biggest mistakes small businesses make and what to do about it"

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