Do It! Marketing Blog: Marketing for Smart People™

Forget about your cheap company pens... 

Trash your company logo coffee mugs...

Your personalized gift strategy is about to get a MAJOR upgrade so that YOU get 100 times more bang for the buck than you're getting now... 

And it's all about ONE simple shift... 

Watch the video to see how it works - PLUS you'll get three smart examples YOU can model from starting right now...

Tags: Marketing speaker, marketing coach, marketing tips, personalized gifts

What do you think? Please use the COMMENTS area below to share the most meaningful business gifts you've received - or sent!

In my role as a business coach, my clients often ask me if they should spend the time and money to be listed in this directory or that trade show book or some magazine's "Marketplace" section. 

Here's the answer for YOU and YOUR business if you've ever wondered the same thing. 

But first, remember the Yellow Pages?

Their old tagline was "Let Your Fingers Do the Walking."

It was more convenient - in the 1960's and 1970's - to use the Yellow Pages and your rotary phone to find out what you needed to know about local businesses than to literally walk from store to store or office to office.

Check out this sign and you'll see where this tale starts to unravel: 

Photo credit: Rolando Pujol

Yes, you can find Tony's One Hour Cleaners in the Yellow Pages. 

Along with Sam's One Hour Cleaners, Jiffy Dry Cleaning, and dozens of other competitors all over town. This was great for consumers up until about 1992 when the web took over much of this same functionality (and multiplied its marketing power by about 1000-fold.)

And it's pretty dumb for business owners today. 

Why? Because the moment you're "in the book" - you're a commodity. 

You are ACTIVELY inviting your prospects, customers, clients and influencers to comparison-shop your ad vs. their ad. Your listing vs. their listing. Your trade show booth vs. their trade show booth. 

And don't even get me started on trade show exhibiting. Unless you're in the top 5% of folks who TRULY know what they're doing, exhibiting at a trade show is nothing more than endless days of exhaustion, massive expense and being proactively ignored by people walking rapidly to the back of the exhibit center to get their bagel while working insanely hard to avoid eye contact with you and your staff at all costs. 

As I share in my small business marketing seminars, we're living in an ATTENTION economy. Meaning, first you must earn your prospect's attention. And only then do you get the chance to earn their money.

And these days, it's damn difficult to earn anyone's attention with a BIGGER ad, a BOLDER directory listing, or a SPLASHIER banner. 

Nobody cares. Truly. So give it up.

The expiration date on that strategy has come and gone like a bucket of old yogurt.

Today, you can save all that money and put it toward creating resources, tools and content that your target market will VALUE, will KEEP and will SHARE. 

Am I nuts? Is directory advertising still working for YOU? 

And then leave a comment below with your questions, thoughts, and advice on the ideas above.

Are you a DO IT freak? Welcome to the club!! Please use the social media buttons at the top of this post to share it with your network. YOU are a rock star!

As a marketing speaker and marketing coach, many of my clients have neither the budget nor the business model to justify a big advertising budget, much less advertising on TV... BUT a while back there was a Home Depot television commercial that brilliantly demonstrated an understanding of HOW their customers (and yours) make purchasing decisions.

It went something like this…

A man is standing in the tool department holding a drill while his wife looks on dubiously.

He obviously wants to buy it, but apparently expects some resistance from his wife so in an effort to convince her says, "Don't think of this as a drill, think of this as your new book shelves."

Well, his ploy worked because in the next scene, the same couple is standing in front of the table saws. He smiles at his wife, points to one and says, "And think of this as your new deck!"

The final scene shows the same couple getting ready to purchase a shop vac. Only this time the woman speaks up and says, "And I can think of this as my clean garage!"

Not only do they do a stellar job of articulating their products' benefits but they do so without mentioning one feature! So, the next time you're tempted to itemize your products' or services' nifty features take a deep breath and stop.

Instead, articulate how those features translate into customer benefits, outcomes, and results.

http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090414/FREE/904149967

Of course internet ad dollars will grow... too bad most marketing and ad execs stubbornly refuse see the light...

Great example came across my desk last week from an "old media" (print) publisher friend of mine in response to one of my articles that "old media is dead - welcome to the age of inbound marketing."

Here it is - reprinted verbatim with a ton of free sand into which he firmly sticks his head:

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There's a reason they call Google a search engine... users have an immediate need to find information and Google becomes the handy reference. If that need doesn't exist for any length of time, the user isn't compelled to go to that search engine (or for that matter, any other website). I'm not trying to minimize Google's value, just keeping it all in perspective. Furthermore, most users don't want spam (read advertising) to be visible... they find it an intrusion to see a message pop up when not requested. How many iPods do you think Apple would have sold strictly by posting a link/ad on Google ads? Do you think they could have approached the 1mm plus goal? Do you think their heavy TV campaign was a useless expenditure? Why not just use their own website? Do you know something the good folks at Apple don't? I can tell you my 17 year-old son certainly doesn't want me to mute the TV when their ads are running. The point is that the internet is a valuable addition to the "traditional" media mix but certainly not it's replacement.
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This is classic "Say it isn't so" wishful thinking. This poor sap's print advertising clients are NOT Fortune 500 companies (like Apple) who can afford to do a wide range of "brand" and "image" advertising. They are much more direct response marketers where they want the phone to ring and the orders to come in when they spend dollars on marketing.

Is he even serious when he expands his Apple TV commercial argument to suggest that all kinds of people WANT to watch all kinds of TV commercials, and thus advertising 1.0 is alive and well?

That's not only stupid, it's being irresponsible with client marketing dollars. My point is: you can't fix stupid.

Some marketing execs "get it" that their world has changed dramatically... and some other marketers are happy to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic and slowly sink under the waves as the orchestra plays on.