Marketing and Advertising are two terms most small business owners interchange. They don’t really understand the difference, and it does make a big difference to your business.
The cost of creating a cool website today really isn’t much when you look at the overall cost of running a business. Better yet, the cost of reaching out and putting your name and logo in front of millions of people every day is now possible for less than 1 seconds worth of the time a superbowl ad runs.
So why do companies run Super Bowl ads? For Budweiser the answer is simple. The Super Bowl ads have moved from advertising to marketing. Their customers expect it. The rest of the companies are running ads, plain and simple.
Advertising is simply getting your name in front of people with the “hope” that they remember who you are at the right time. The real truth is the brain doesn’t quite work that way. We are much more abstract than that. If I ran an ad for BG chocolates enough, the most likely thing that will happen is people will want to try my chocolate and then buy their favorite, or the best packaged chocolate on the shelf when they decide to buy.
That packaging by the way is marketing, not advertising.
For most small businesses, advertising is a waste of time. You do it because everyone else is and you feel like you have too. Well the truth is you don’t.
Marketing and Sales go hand in hand. Their combined purpose is to get your product or service in the hands of your customer and the customers money in your bank account. Plain and simple. Every step of a sales funnel is geared this way, and every “Ad” used in marketing should be geared this way.
Small business owners have a love hate relationship with a little split test we do. A split test is where you create two chains of events and change just one thing to see what happens. The thing I like to change is the website. If they have a super fancy website with lots of flash graphics and video, the owners are like a proud papa, and love showing it off.
The entire mission of a marketing company is about connecting with potential new clients, staying connected with current clients and re-connecting with old clients. Being cool online is just being cool, and doing both is expensive.
