What Is The Best Way To Advertise Your Business or How To Build The Best Marketing Plan?

I get this question all the time from clients ,friends and colleagues, ” I have very limited budgets, what is the best way to advertise my business?” People asking this question of course know deep down inside that there is not perfect fit solution to market their business, and there is not best way or place to find customers through marketing or advertising. The word best is obviously very relative, and every situation is different. In truth it’s not rocket science, as  I will outline below a very simple 3 step formula to test any and all marketing plans against to see if it is likely to work. I usually just humor these questions with my simple answer that your customers are your best media, and focus your efforts of delivering an exceptional experience to your customers, one that they can’t stop talking about… but, the truth is obviously much more complex than that.

I was sitting in the audience at Smash Summit several months ago, and the founder of a fast growing startup made a statement which had everyone in the audience nodding in agreement, and feeling empathetic… That is, everybody but me. I vocally voiced my disagreement, and plainly stated that their error was not in what they tried, but in how they did it. The statement was, “We Made The Mistake of Trying Print Advertising.” Everyone on stage and in the audience agreed with them, and seemed to know the feeling of failing at print advertising. The thing is, I can assure you that there are some print ads that have been running for 20 years and still work like a charm today. Their mistake was not in trying print, but in failing to match their strategy against the 3 step formula outlined below. I Got Up and Said as much to which, the moderator humorously replied, “What they need was a magazine advertisement that people can click on.”

Dan Kennedy wrote a book called The Ultimate Marketing Plan, which is an absolute must read for anyone serious about marketing their business. His fundamentals are pretty basic and I will outline his Formula below.

Every Marketing Plan or Strategy must be comprised of 3 elements. These 3 elements need to fit together like a glove or they won’t work. If one of the three is not congruent with the others, there is a very decent chance your marketing efforts will fail.

Look at Advertising like a Triangle. one one side is The Market you are trying to reach. On another side is The Media you use to reach that MARKET, and the third side is the Message you use to communicate through your media to your target market.

Every Marketing plan needs to start with identifying exactly who your market is. The next step is recognizing where you can find your market, and more importantly where you can find them when they are in the frame of mind of solving the problem you solve. Of course, you also need to make sure your message clearly communicates to them how your solution solves their problem.

So, a blanket question about the best place to advertise or that Print Advertising doesn’t work for online brands, I can assure you that is not the case. Not only that, I have actually tracked how offline advertising drives search behavior online, so you can theoretically drive searchers to search for easier words for you to optimize around, and harder for your competitors to be just a click away. Thats the real challenge with online marketing that print does a great job moving away from and direct mail completely eliminates, which is… “Your Competitors are not just a click away offline.”

So, the next time you consider running an advertisement, ask yourself if you are using the right message for that specific media to engage and motivate action from your target market, and if the answer is yes, now you just have to make sure the economics work, which is an equally important next step to the Ultimate Marketing Plan… Making the Math Work. (This requires buying media at the right price, and finding ways to maximize the value of a new customer and transaction generated from that ad source.)

Happy Hunting For Customers.

About David Melamed

David Melamed is the Founder of Tenfold Traffic, a search and content marketing agency with over $50,000,000 of paid search experience and battle tested results in content development, premium content promotion and distribution, Link Profile Analysis, Multinational/Multilingual PPC and SEO, and Direct Response Copywriting.

Comments

  1. “I usually just humor these questions with my simple answer… focus your efforts of delivering an exceptional experience to your customers, one that they can’t stop talking about… but, the truth is obviously much more complex than that.” It’s true that it’s much more complex than that I don’t think anyone goes into business expecting it to be that easy (though I’m sure that everyone in business does actually wish that it was – I certainly do), but sometimes I think the importance of customer service in marketing is forgotten; that some people focus so much on advertising their business that they forget about the quality of their service. But, to the actual point, I love that you stood up and said something about that statement because it was just wrong. “We Made The Mistake of Trying Print Advertising.” sounds like nothing more than a bad attitude to a media that didn’t quite work well, without taking the time to tweak it and to try and make it work. It’s not just going to happen – well, it ‘might’ but that would be very lucky – but if a business takes into account that advertising triangle and know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll be able to work to have all avenues of advertisement pay off.

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