Don’t expect anyone to beat a path to your door. It happens, but so rarely that you shouldn’t bet on it, no matter how glorious your mousetrap. You’re going to need to advertise and promote your stuff.
You may already be advertising, sort of. Your customers will carry their opinions into the world. You may have a Facebook page, or even a Web site. You may Twitter – tell us how that’s working out for you.
A formal advertising campaign takes more time, effort, and money than Facebook and warm feelings from your clients. If you’re going to spend real effort advertising, you should have a marketing plan first.
You should know up front that advertising is a great way to tell a lot of people about your new product. And it’s a perfectly miserable way to get anyone to actually buy anything. Sales promotions – samples, coupons, product tie-ins, demonstrations – tend to work better to close a sale . . . assuming customers have heard of you and have some kind of emotional or rational incentive to buy.
Your promotional campaign needs to have a clear goal. “Tell people about our products,” isn’t a goal – it’s too broad. But “Introduce our product to at least 30 percent of affluent 30-45 year old parents in the local media market,” is specific enough.
A basic promotional goal has four things: A brand, a target audience, a position for the product, and a desired outcome from the promotion.
Your marketing plan should identify your target customers – the people you think you can best serve with your product or service. It should explain where you want your product to be positioned relative to competing products – faster, safer, cooler, better value, et cetera. And it should spell out what you want your brand to mean – the associations you want the public to make with your product or service.
And the goal – the desired outcome? Well, that depends on where you and your product stand. You might think the desired goal would always be “Buy our stuff!” But that’s not really true. Sometimes, you’re just trying to get people’s attention and increase awareness because your product is new. Sometimes you’re trying to inspire curiosity – or deep desire – for your product to set it apart from competitors.
Sometimes you want to inform potential buyers of a very specific value your product may have to them, for consumers who make very calculated purchasing decisions. Sometimes, yes, you want people to just buy your stuff. And sometimes you just want to inspire warm fuzzy feelings so they’ll keep coming back.
That’s usually the order in which advertising develops for a brand over time, by the way. Awareness, then interest and desire, then purchasing action, then satisfaction. It’s hard to do all of that at once. A promotional campaign can take a while. Instantly successful advertisements are things of legend.
Knowing those things, you can start looking for the best ways to communicate your message to your target audience.
You may be asking yourself how much you should spend. Many industries have informal rules-of-thumb setting marketing budgets as a percentage of sales revenue. We don’t think that’s all that useful for a startup or small business. Instead, you should set your ad budget against the goals of your promotional campaign.
If you’re spending less than $25,000 on an ad campaign, you’re probably not going to be able to use the services of a large advertising firm. But you probably don’t have to. Local media – newspapers, radio, television, Web sites – will probably have creative staff on hand to help you create an advertisement.
Advertisers measure the value of an ad in CPM, or cost per thousand ad views (M for thousands in Latin). You should usually expect the CPM to rise depending on how targeted the audience is in a given medium. The Lifetime Network or the G4 video gaming network, for example, could probably charge more on a CPM basis, simply because the audiences for their shows are more homogeneous than people watching Mad Men or David Letterman.
Here are some estimated costs in CPM and raw dollars for an ad in various media. Some of these are broad guesses, based on ad costs and circulation reported online. As you can see, advertising online and on television is really cheap per ad, but will cost several thousand dollars to be effective. Magazines cost a lot on a CPM basis, but are really powerful ways to target an audience. And direct mail is extremely expensive, but gets exactly the right people if you’ve got a good mailing list.
· Billboard – $5,000 to $100,000+ a month, depending on the size of the market, 1-6 CPM
· Yellow pages – Free for a line, $250-$25,000 for a 1-inch ad, depending on market. 20 CPM
· Direct mail -- $0.30 per mailing per person, 300 CPM (!)
· Cable Television, 30 second ad, at least $2000 to produce
· Network Television, 30 second ad:
· Internet, $100-500 to build an ad
· Radio, $500-1000 to produce
· Newspaper, $100-500 to produce
· Magazine, $200 to $1000 to produce
We hope that you noticed the absence of a price for an e-mail campaign. Unsolicited e-mail – spam – is generally illegal and a pain in the neck for everyone involved. Consumers hate spam. Just say no.
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