Entries Tagged 'Consumer Behavior' ↓

How inundated are we with advertising these days? So much so that we tune most of it out. This is especially true in today’s digital age, where we are able to TiVo through ads on television or surf past them on the Internet. With this, it makes it more challenging for small business owners out there to come up with advertisements that will be eye-catching enough for your target audience to PAY ATTENTION to it.

Unlike giant behemoths like the CBS Television Network, small businesses have limited budgets and restricted resources. Our marketing, by necessity, is usually much more focused than that of our bigger business brethren. No, we don’t have million-dollar budgets or a gaggle of high-priced, well-educated marketing whizzes coming up with clever ideas for us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow a good idea of theirs when we see one … and I see one. Take a simple idea and make it in such a way that will capture your audiences’ attention

CBS has been collaborating with EggFusion, a company which (well, you can guess by now) uses the egg as a concept for creative advertising and marketing. Besides advertisers, they also reach out to other areas such as producers, retailers and consumers. Now that is what I call being an all-rounder!

No, you may not have a budget that allows you to imprint millions of eggs with your company logo, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be clever. In fact, I would wager that it is your entrepreneurial cleverness that sets you apart. After all, you would not step into the tricky and risky world of business if you weren’t a smarty pants

Use it. Come up with a new idea and run with it. Be different, be remarkable. Do the UNEGGSPECTED

If you want your advertising to “stick” with prospective customers, it’s essential that you appeal to their emotions in some way. I’m sure you’ve had experiences in which you’ve watch an out-of-this-world commercial on TV (be it silly but hilarious like Jack in the Box,  or simply breathtakingly eye catching like the Chanel No. 5 commercial where Nicole Kidman and Baz  teamed up to do a Moulin Rouge style ad). Fail to do this and you might as well be throwing money out the window.

Effective ads sell your message, company, or product. They may or may not be creative, but if you can package some good creative in with a message that appeals to a strong need or want within your target audience, it will certainly help. Like a broken recorder, I emphasize on research, research, and…….research 

Effective ads are convincing. They engage potential customers as if you were speaking directly to them, and when you succeed in making this connection your prospective customer’s thoughts will become your brand itself. So the rule of thumb is that you ‘speak’ to them, to their emotions, to the core of their being.

Even if you achieve the enviable position of having a provocative ad execution with an effective message, your work is far from over. In fact, in the world of advertising, your work is never over!

Continually exposing your customers, prospective customers, and suspects (those who aren’t currently interested in your company or product, but who might be shortly) to the same messaging over a prolonged period of time will lead to stagnation. Eventually, you’ll fail not only to inspire brand loyalty, but also to retain it. Even Coke, one of the world’s most valuable brands, reinvents its messaging and image when it decides they have begun to lose effectiveness. It is human nature to get bored after being exposed repeatedly to the same old advertisement or message. In psychology language, we call this ‘repeated exposure’. Thus, change and adaptation is an essential ingredient to maintaining customers’ loyalty to your brand and services.

Creating an Effective Ad Campaign
So how do you create an effective ad campaign? One way is to go with the single benefit methodology, which directly links your brand to a single benefit. If your deodorant lasts longer, tell the world about it. The characterization or personification angle involves creating a character that expresses the product’s benefits or personality. The narrative methodology involves developing a narrative story with episodes describing a problem and its outcome.

Again, aim to produce advertising that states not only a product’s facts, but that also appeals to emotions. Using the deodorant example, you might accomplish this by playing off your customers’ fears of having body odor at an inopportune time. Your ad must make your audience feel like the MUST have it and that they cannot live without it.

Although a calculated and well thought out advertising campaign may do a good job of creating brand awareness, it may fall short of inducing product preference or, the end goal, purchase. Whatever it may be, don’t give up and treat the customers you have well. As the saying goes, a good deed goes a longgggg way….and you never know,  the power of word of mouth as a form of advertisement can be pretty effective too!

We all know that advertising is like air to our lungs. We NEED it to survive. Same goes for our business…but there’s a difference between good advertising and bad advertising, which you should know by now, has its consequences.

If you hate reading long, wordy stuff….let me give you the shortcut:

Business + Good advertising =  $$$$$$$$$

Typically, advertising and promotion are vital to the success of a business. To successfully advertise you will need to allocate a portion of your budget for such purposes. The size of this percentage will depend on the size of your business and the scope of the market that you are trying to reach. Proportionally, a small business and a multimillion-dollar corporation may spend the same percentage of their budget on advertising. If the advertising campaign is carefully planned to reach the target audience, the resulting increase in business may also be a similar percentage. For example a few well-placed billboards in a small town might generate a 10 percent increase in sales for a small business while a national commercial might produce the same 10 percent increase for a major retail chain. Therefore, do some serious research and budgeting to ensure that the money you allocate does not go to waste.

Your focus, when advertising, needs to be on:

1. The type of media to reach most effectively your target audience
2. The type of advertising campaign you will run, e.g. to promote a new product, to place a familiar product or company name in front of the audience, or to promote a special service or activity
3. The advertising style that best suits your products and/or services
4. How can you reach the most people (within your defined market) for your advertising dollar

Again, my suggestion is that you do some research like handing out questionnaires to your targeted audience. Also ensure that your sample is randomized so that your results will less biased.

When you advertise, you are investing in your own business, and, as with any type of investment, there are risks involved. The major risk is that the advertisements will not generate enough sales to justify the costs of the campaign. As is the case with any investment, through due diligence you will determine the most appropriate and secure means of advertising before taking such risks.

You could write down a list of ways to advertise and list the pros and cons of each type of advertising. For example, advertisement on the web, billboard, magazines, TV, Radio, etc. With that you can hopefully see which type of advertising will give you the most benefits with the least risk.

In a nutshell, do your research, draw up a list of ways to advertise, take a deep breath (just to make it sound dramatic) and make your decision. A calculated risk it is but hey, if you have the guts to start your own business, choosing how you want to advertise your business should be a piece of cake!

It takes some knowledge of basic psychology and human behavior to succeed at marketing. It does not take a genius to figure out what makes people buy (or not buy) things. The human behavior IS psychology baby! Tap into this and you will witness wonders in your business sales

People buy things to either meet their needs or satisfy their wants and desires. As a marketer, you are looking not at what your product has to offer, but at what is motivating your target audience to buy your product or service. For example, people aren’t buying perfume because of the aroma. They are buying romance. The new exercise machine doesn’t sell because of the latest features, but because the customer is buying a healthier, perhaps thinner look. The end result of a product or service is what it does for buyers — how it makes them feel, look, or act. People buy the idea behind it, not the product per say. Therefore, you need to keep broad motivational reasons in mind when planning your marketing campaign.

I suggest you might want to do some research on your target audience to test the effectiveness of your product or service….in psychological term they call it ‘pre-test’ and ‘post-test’. Pre-test is when you conduct your research (using methods such as questionnaires) on a small sample of your target audience before you introduce your product or service and post-test is the same questionnaire given to the same sample of target audience after they tried your service or product. With this, you will roughly know if your product or service will ‘make the cut’.

There is also a psychological aspect to establishing trust and forming a relationship. Like all relationships, trust is the basis of it. Most customers have been burned, treated badly, swindled, or disenchanted at least once. They will not necessarily jump at the opportunity to buy something unless they have a sense of confidence in the seller. In an age where people are tired of receiving spam and a glut of marketing materials, the modern consumer has become savvy and somewhat cynical. Only a company with a strong proven reputation will gain their trust. You, therefore, want to always build a level of trust through quality of service, and this should be reflected in your marketing.

Finally, there are practical factors that enter into marketing. If it is simply inconvenient for a customer to purchase from you or you simply cannot satisfy their needs with the product they are seeking, then don’t attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. Too many sales are lost by trying to do so. Just be who you are (this should apply to your business ethics too). If you don’t, you may risk ending a future relationship with the customer by losing their trust.

In the end you want to sell customers by gaining their trust and building a relationship based on customer satisfaction and by being honest and not trying to be everything to everyone.

If this article is TOO long and annoyingly tiring to read, just remember this: TRUST is everything, work hard at building trust with your customers. Everything else will flow well once you get the hang of that!