Suffering From Advertising Attention Deficit Disorder?

If you are like most business people today you are constantly looking for better, cheaper ways to advertise and market your business. You try Direct Mail, Postcards, Radio, TV or Billboards. It all seems very expensive and you want it to work. All of the previous mentioned medias have their strengths and weaknesses, but campaigns on any or all of them can and will fail if you are not aware of three basic facts.

Understanding the reasons for failure, you can avoid and plan for success.

There are three basic reasons today why advertising and marketing programs fail:

1. An underestimation of the amount of effort it will take to get an advertising return.

The fact of life today concerning marketing and promotion is that we live in an over-advertised society. One wakes up on their Serta “Perfect Sleeper” mattress to their GE “We bring good things to life” alarm clock and drives to the “Golden Arches” for breakfast in their “The American Revolution” Chevrolet. By the time people have gotten to work they have driven past hundreds of signs, billboards and bumper stickers. They are exposed to many, many commercials on the radio and TV. At work their computers have become an intrusive barrage of advertisements with a couple hundred email messages a day and the Internet! You can see that the average person is bombarded with advertising.

The last research done on the subject showed that the average American is exposed to 1800 advertising messages – a day! People are over exposed, over worked, stressed out and short on time. If you remember that the whole world has AADD (Advertising Attention Deficit Disorder) you will begin to understand the amount of effort needed just to get noticed in today’s market place. People simply do not have enough attention to go around, simple as that.

What does this mean to you? It means if you want results from your advertising, know cause #1 for advertising failure.

2. Low or no frequency: Frequency is an advertising term that simply means the number of times a target audience sees or hears an advertising message.

An average person needs to see your message at least three times before they take notice, six times before they remember it and ten – fifteen times before they take action and buy something from you. If you are running a marketing program that generates too low a frequency, you would get better results stapling $100 bills to your business cards and throwing them off the top of a skyscraper.

A close cousin to frequency is consistency. Consistency is measured by time and is simply advertising regularly on a particular medium or in the case of direct mail to a specific mailing list. Very few ad campaigns are one hit wonders but build results over time. The reason for this is there is no way of telling how many people will be in the market (have a need) for your product at any one given time, you cannot time your advertising to the market. The only sure thing is that over the course of four (4) to twelve (12) months hundreds if not thousands of people will come into the market and want to buy what you sell. If they are aware of you when they are ready to buy you will get a visit or call, if not you won’t. It is as simple as that. You can build frequency with your audience if you are consistent and regular with your efforts.

If you have the mindset you are going to advertise with consistency and regularity, you are setting yourself up to win big in the advertising and marketing game. Generally you will find that you get more results the 4th, 5th or 6th time you advertise to a group of prospects compared to your first time results.

The rule of thumb is that the bigger the ticket-item the longer people shop, which means you need to reach them early, regularly and often. The smaller the ticket-item the more often and regularly people move in and out of the buying zone, which means you need to reach them regularly and often.

3. The advertising campaign fails is that the business owner or manager did not know the real value of a customer. Knowing this number can help make the advertising decisions and the calculation of effectiveness easier.

As far as how much you should market, that depends on your budget. If you have a limited budget and try to do too many different mediums, you will not achieve the frequency to get the results. It is always better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a little fish in a big pond. Frequency can make you the big fish. You just have to select the right size pond for the amount of marketing money you have.

Once you have a pond to fish in – go fishing regularly and often.

Wilson Printing is a direct mail specialist. We can help you find the right size pond to fish in AKA “a targeted mailing list”. We can help you design an effective mailer, print it and mail it for a very affordable price.

Mark Hale
CEO