As the national economy continues to cough and wheeze, small business keeps struggling to stay afloat. Promises of "stimulus money" don't go very far when the sales revenue picture doesn't get any better and payrolls have to be met, taxes must be paid, landlords and utilities need to be appeased, and suppliers have to be maintained.
There are always lots of options for businesses to take, ranging from a plethora of cost cutting measures that often involve dismissing employees, closing branches and otherwise whittling down expenses, to calling it a day and looking for some other way to make a living. For those businesses that decide to brave the storm, reality dictates that they find some way to at least maintain a reasonable profit level or even better, raise profits.
A long-standing tenet of business success says that contacting the largest amount of people for the least amount of money and persuading them that your product solves their problems is a good idea. Although this very basic concept is at the heart of every successful business venture, it is abused and ignored by far more companies than embrace it. The reason for this is simple; the precept has two components..."contacting the largest amount of people for the lowest amount of money" and "and persuading them that your product solves their problems."
While most businesses become obsessed with the first part...the one about contacting the most people for the least expenditure...they often do so at the expense of the second part...the one that deals with persuading people to think and act a certain way. The result is that "do it on the cheap" replaces "do it to make more money" as a top-of-the-mind business philosophy.
So what am I really talking about? I'm talking about advertising. I'm talking about a discipline that enables companies to talk to potential customers hundreds, thousands or millions at a time for a pittance compared to the cost of eyeball-to-eyeball contact. I'm talking about a business practice that can possibly pull any business out of the red and into the black...if only it's done correctly.
But why, if advertising is the simple answer, don't more businesses use it in these tough times to shore up their profits and weather the storm? The answer is that many try to, but they don't go about it correctly. For one thing, it looks too easy, so its difficulty is often underestimated...just run some ads talking about your product's features, print up some sales literature, maybe shave a percentage point or two off the price, and viola, things have got to get better. For another, computers have abridged all the voodoo of typesetting and graphic design, so anybody can assemble their own advertising materials with just a little effort. Also, Internet gurus are endlessly proselytizing that all advertising practices up to now are old fashioned and wrong, all that's needed in the 21st century to build a brand is Engagement Marketing via social media interactivity — it's virtually cost free and everyone's connected to everyone else in every corner of the planet.
Actually, all the promise of the Brave New World of advertising over the Internet simply compounds the under-budgeting problem. Advertisers, seeking ways to spread their diminishing spending, always look for "deals," and the lure of the almost-free Internet is just too good to pass up.
Without getting into a dissertation on the misconceptions surrounding the singular value of Engagement Marketing, I suggest that traditional advertising precepts, however they are implemented, are, and always have been, a key to success. The 5 basic steps in successful ad campaigns are: 1) Identifying target audiences and their needs; 2) understanding how a product's benefits relate to those needs; 3) communicating those benefits to target audiences in their language on a timely basis; 4) correctly interpreting responses; and 5) reacting to prospect/customer response in a manner conducive to the next phase in the sales process.
These 5 steps are not new, nor have they been improved upon by any recent creative wizardry or media developments. They are time-tested and essentially etched in marble for all to see, a path to success that can't be missed. But these steps are more difficult to accomplish than they appear to be, and companies that circumvent the process in search of quick or cheap promotional answers discover that their advertising accomplishes a fraction of what it should, adding little to their company's bottom line but more red ink.
The online frenzy is not the culprit, but merely the latest "fast and cheap road to success" that feeds the corporate cost-cutting dragon and plunges businesses head long into DIY advertising formulated essentially to please the CFO.
The solution to this problem is easy to say, but difficult to do. Follow the rules. Whether online, offline or (preferably) a well-reasoned combination of the two, advertising WILL WORK if businesses simply do it right. By hiring professional communicators or by learning advertising philosophy and technique, businesses can stop shooting themselves in the foot and start digging out of the hole in which they find themselves.
Of course, advertising can't solve problems brought on by poor management, bad product development, financial blundering, marketing errors or any of a number of tragic miscues, but it IS the most viable link between any company and its customers and prospects, so if all the other ducks are relatively in a row, advertising can be the activity that leads a company to the promised land.
