Branding or Immediate Response?

Welcome to Marble City Marketing, a new Knoxville blog focusing on local marketing and advertising in our wonderful city. With this blog, hopefully you’ll learn new ways to market your business, or to market your business more efficiently.

One of the key missteps we see in local marketing (and not just in Knoxville) occurs when a business doesn’t utilize the correct strategy for the end goal. What does that mean? There are two types of strategies for advertising and marketing:

• Branding
• Immediate Response

If you aren’t familiar with these terms, here is a very quick, way too basic breakdown.

• Branding is any kind of marketing that enhances your company’s brand – creating trust and credibility in the audience’s heart and mind. Basically, they are very aware of you and have familiarity with you.
• Immediate response is a strategy where your goal is to motivate the audience to do something RIGHT NOW. Whether it’s a killer deal or an expiring offer, the goal is short-term.

These strategies seem simple enough, but we’ve witnessed these mistakes in Knoxville and nationally. It’s a very simple fix. If you’re hoping to brand your business via marketing on television and/or radio, it’s very simple.

Branding Strategy

When branding, you don’t need a million spots per week. Your goal should be to consistently invite people to your business, hopefully everyday. If you’re on a budget (c’mon, we all are), I suggest owning a part of the day. If you know your customers are 9-5’ers, then target their morning drive into work on the radio and/or the early morning TV news shows while they are preparing for their day. The morning is routine. I shower at the same time, brush my teeth at the same time, press my shirt at the same time, etc. Imagine the power of becoming part of that routine. Now I would say, “I shower at the same time, brush my teeth at the same, see the Brown Squirrel commercial at the same time, ……” Imagine that for your business.

Immediate Response

A certain Knoxville radio GSM is an expert in marketing. He’s worked as a radio rep, agency media buyer, and station GSM. He makes it very easy to win with immediate response campaigns. Our industry already knew this, but he made it simple for business owners and stations alike. You need three things to run a successful immediate response campaign:

• Lots of spots (frequency)
• A legitimate offer (not 10% off – something BIG)
• Sense of urgency (“offer good until…”)

Immediate response campaigns are a different beast than branding campaigns. You have, at most, a month to advertise this kind of campaign. An example of a legitimate offer is the John H. Daniel “Buy 1, Get 2 suits free” campaign. However, I don’t remember any kind of end date on the sale. Auto dealerships are great example of immediate response campaigns. They tell you, “TODAY IS THE LAST DAY!”

We hope this first post helps you identify your goal for a campaign, then implement the right plan for success. Once you have that figured out, only a bad spot can thwart your victory. We’ll talk about that next time.

Also, many people have used Brown Squirrel Furniture as an example of an Immediate Response campaign that seemed silly. They remember when Brown Squirrel ran “Going out of Business” sales every month. I would like to update you that they are no longer employing that strategy. You can see the latest spots at Brown Squirrel’s website.