|
For nearly 20 years I’ve worked with many small companies with advertising for our magazines and with their advertising and marketing in general. From this view I see where common marketing mistakes are made, dollars are wasted and how people can simply and practically improve their advertising impact.
Common Mistake: Not spending your first dollars getting the proper visuals — photography and logo. (Logos will be discussed in a future blog.)
Regularly I see that people will buy advertising in whatever they can afford — some print here and there, a website, business cards, phone book, etc. When I come in to work with them on their ad, I find that they have no images for us to work with.
Frequently there’s no logo and no photography illustrating what they do, or the images they have are of poor quality for reproducing in print or for telling their story visually. They might be spending $3,000 (or much more) per month on advertising, but “saving money” by not paying for logo design or photography.
What's wrong with this?
One of the many goals of visual advertising is to brand your company or, simply, to have people see your message, learn who you are, remember who you are and feel comfortable doing business with you. All of us are bombarded with messages continually, and if a company has different messages, photos and logo attempts in each ad — no common thread throughout all of them — it doesn't register to customers they’re learning about the same company each time they see your advertising. It ends up looking like $3,000 monthly advertising for lots of companies rather than one. Additionally, advertising should encourage the public to do business with you — and it’s easier to create a great ad when you have good visuals to begin with — and bad ads become invisible.
Let’s look at a sample case study showing how things would be different with the basics done first.
Case study of a start-up business spending money on photography up front:
Two brothers with years of part-time personal training experience are taking a space of their own and looking for growth to do this full-time. Currently their clients are solely from referral or word-of-mouth. Money is limited for advertising now, but they hope to add to that more as they get going. The first moneys they will spend will be on a photographer.
They have a boomer male client and a boomer female client who have lost more than 100 lbs. each, willing to be testimonial models. The “before” shots they have show out-of-condition, not vibrantly happy people. The “after” images will be the cornerstone of the brothers’ advertising/marketing campaign. The photography will show the models doing what they are passionate about now: the man playing golf and the woman lifting weights — showing their new active lifestyle. The brothers are looking for a professional photographer to capture the difference in the couple’s current emotional (more confident, determined, happier) and physical states. (Professional photographers have the equipment to get crisper, better reproducible images, know how to use lighting and should get the “money” shot you’re looking for.) They believe this is the inspiration that will make new prospects hire them — so they can be transformed, too.
In their location, the best image of each model will be blown up and converted to wallpaper and hung in a prominent entry location. These images will appear at the end of each email they send out, with business cards possibly and with every ad they run. As they add to their budget, they want to keep the consistency of these same two images in everything they do. Again, they want inspiring images that lead others to take action.
By spending about $1,000 up front, they will coordinate all their messaging. When our graphic designer works on their ad, they will give us what we need, and it will be the same image that they give to the other advertising graphics people from other magazines, newspapers, etc. When they’re spending $3,000 per month, they will be running a COORDINATED campaign, as compared to a smattering of this and that. The public will begin to learn, remember and feel comfortable with only one company.
Can you see how that $1,000 of up front photography used in a coordinated way makes all the other moneys spent down the road make sense?
|
