ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER

Understanding the difference between marketing and advertising can be the difference between success and a quick return to the time clock.

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"The one act of placing an ad can be a small part of a comprehensive marketing strategy but it is not “a marketing plan”.

Confusing Advertising With Marketing

From the book; Forward marketing

by: RIchard Hendry, co-founder of main street business consulting

Advertising is a simple and basic deal.

You place a well thought out ad in a product that has a built-in proven exposure to an active market base.

One that you have been lead to believe you will be able to leverage to your benefit in a way that justifies the expense.

And then you wait for the response.

Marketing is rather complex.

It involves the relentless process of introduction and presentation of your business on multiple platforms of exposure. A process that engages the buyer in a factual way and provides a compelling value statement that is easy to understand and retain.

The one act of placing an ad can be a small part of a comprehensive marketing strategy but it is not “a marketing plan”.

A marketing plan is not something that you work out with a representative of the local radio station or cable provider. In fact, these people are the last people you want to talk to in this process. And hopefully – you will never need to talk to them at all.

The differences between advertising and marketing plan are vast.

A marketing plan is full time partner of your overall business adventure. And as such, must be held accountable for its actives and must add value.

So, just like your daily sales, cost of goods and overhead – marketing and its results must be tractable. It must be designed in such a way that one can clearly see what kind of ROI it is providing.

With this in mind, the type of advertising that we would place under marketing, must be ones that are not ambiguous. It must be simple to gauge their effectiveness and value. From the start, this will cull out certain kinds of advertising products and services. Some of which might be of value for branding or partnering later but for now – we are targeting response based advertising as part of the marketing strategy.

To keep it simple, call to action advertising is the easy ones to gauge response from. A sale or discount that has a limited shelf life and can be tracked with easy. Most sales people do like to sell you a one off or run a limited time.

They have been trained to push for long term commitment and use the universal disclaimer about “frequency gets results”. Yet in that world – the longer you run, the less likely you are to be able to judge their effectiveness.

Consider this;

You open in June and run with a local advertising product for 6 months. During that time, you build up level of exposure from many areas and online. Plus you have reviews and client referrals.

Then when you really need to look at the next year’s budget – you have no clear way of knowing what level of effectiveness that product had.

But, like most people – you might be scared to change for fear that it was over performing.

So you continue to throw money at something that was too vague from the start. Structured wrong and untraceable.

So, under the heading of advertising as part of the marketing plan – we never buy ‘exposure advertising” we buy results based, call to action, response designed ads.

For limited times and we track its performance.

Then we decide if we will do it again.

On our time.

At our pace and on our schedule, not the needs of the sales persons commission needs.

Some details:

if you need the sales person to build your ad -you are not taking an active roll in your business.

Learn how to do this. You do not need to do every ad for the life of your business. However, you must be able to do this. And there is no excuse for not learning how. Just like knowing how to work in Excel, Word, Quickbooks or design and maintain your Facebook or website.

If you are really in it to win it? - you need to be able to do these things. They are skills you must have. Never assume that anyone will do these things like you would.

There are many inexpensive and easy to use programs that you can produce high quality ads with.

ad I will tell you something that is very true here.

No one can or every will sell and talk about your business with the passion and conviction of the owner – you!

Also, there can be last minute deals that you could take advantage of but only if you have an ad ready or can produce your own.

Likewise, if something were to change about your business and it is close to the deadline of a publication – if you can not provide a ready replacement? Your running outdated information or pulling the ad and maybe still paying for it, due to contracts.

Lastly, for many print and online publications, they have an up charge for layout, so some effort now in learning these skills will save you money later. And the lead time for this back and forth for your ad layout from others – means you are making real time decisions further in advance than you need to.

There are tons of reasons why you need to be able to do this internally but the biggest ones are the ones we can not think of right now.

Think back to the car.

You need to be able to drive.

You may not always drive but you need to be able to.

You read more from "Forward Marketing" each week here or you can buy the book at Amazon.com