Stop Advertising and Start Marketing

Marketing, to me, is the art and science of attracting and keeping clients.

Advertising is a particular way to spend money to either get eyeballs to know you exist, or to remind them that you, indeed, still do.  Marketing existed far before advertising, as we generally know it. Advertising started as a means of supporting mass media in the late 1800′s – those early newspapers had to find another way to make money, other than just selling paper.

Once upon a time, in the days of Mad Men, just plastering your name everywhere was good enough to work, often, it was enough to matter.  An advertising campaign really could be a company’s marketing strategy.   A great commercial during the Super Bowl could launch a brand successfully.  And building brands became big business for marketing advertising agencies.

Just think about how wonderful selling advertising is from an agencies’ perspective:  Successfully tracking the efficiency of a branding campaign required at least a master’s degree in statistics, and even then was rarely done.  If you want to make more money, simply convince the victim client to purchase more advertising, of which you take an 10%-15% cut of!   Your job then is to simply spend their money.  What a wonderful business model, don’t you agree?

Oh- you aren’t an advertising agency?

You say you want your money invested into marketing to be accountable?

You want consumers or businesses to purchase your services, rather than to just have heard of you?

Oh.

But what about all the branding guru’s who claim you need to get my name out there through repetition, repetition, repetition?

What we now know is that we are increasingly becoming immune to advertising that isn’t directed to us.  Meaning- we literally don’t see it, it doesn’t register, it, effectively, didn’t count as a repetition.

Of course, your friends will comment on how cool it was that they heard you on the radio/tv/billboard.  And that’s great for your ego.   But unless the message is constructed correctly – in the right place, at the right time, with the right message -  what you you paid for is advertising placement but it effectively, that ad didn’t even count as a single repetition.

That’s why one of the leading causes for small business death is over-spending on advertising, and under-spending on marketing.

So that brings me to the point:  What is Marketing?

Marketing today needs to be a coordinated effort with many disciplines working together to build a path.  John Jantch talks about a marketing hourglass here:

The path is getting a prospect to move through a logical process of being interested, to becoming a trial client, to becoming a regular client, to becoming a referring champion of the business.

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