From 1970 to 2020 I was active in the advertising business. The first half of that time was spent working in various agencies in Toronto, on national and International accounts. The second half was spent working in my own small agency which was called Onwords and Upwords, and that was a mix of larger accounts, boutique agencies, and local entrepreneurial businesses.
I started off as a copywriter, but eventually ended up being a little bit of everything. Strategist, Copywriter, Art Director, and Print and Broadcast Producer. In the second half of my career, those skills served me very well and allowed me to work with smaller clients who wanted to grow as opposed to bigger clients who wanted to get bigger and help new businesses who needed to get their brand out there.
My career put me into contact with a lot of very smart people and I learned a lot from all of them, mainly because they were very generous with their advice.
Today’s advertising world, especially for smaller businesses, is a bit more complex. But the basics have not changed, only the some of tools and the way they are used. So here is an encapsulation of what I learned. Hopefully, there is some advice here that will help you keep your ship afloat or get it built and launched in style.
Strategy: Without a well-defined communications strategy you will go nowhere. You need to clearly define what your business is about, and what makes your business unique and appealing.
A good strategy has several key elements.
1. Market Situation (who is your competition)
2. Target Audience (both the core group and secondary groups who influence the core group)
3. Main Benefit. This is also known as a USP or Unique Selling Proposition, which will allow you to tell your story in a competitively appealing way.
4. Benefit Support: All the reasons why your brand is so appealing.
5. Media: How best to reach the people in your target audience.
6. Brand Character: This sets the tone and manner for all of your communications be they through media, sales or customer service.
Creative People: Once you have defined your strategy you need to find people or develop the ability to interpret that strategy in a creative way. That can be one person with several different skills or a few people with individual skills. These skills include: Strategic Development, Creative Development, Copywriting, Art Direction & Design (Including Web), Production (in all media)
Sales: This is where the rubber meets the road. When you are selling, your entire performance needs to stay in absolute synch with your strategy. If you deviate, you are, more often than not, going to confuse your prospect.
Sales Training: All your salespeople should be totally conversant with your products and or services and how they benefit the prospects they are talking to. Your communications material is as much for their benefit as it is for that of the customer.
Customer Service: Your business should always be able to deal with customer complaints and queries. This is a key component to developing a solid customer base.
Product Improvement: You should always be working on ways to improve your product and incorporate news of those improvements in your marketing and communications.
Research: As your business grows, research becomes invaluable in terms of helping you define and discover ideas for product improvements and keep up to date on what is being understood and misunderstood by your customer base. Research can also help you probe the potential of expanding into markets you may not have originally defined in your strategy.
Company Culture: Your brand is a very important part of your company’s culture. If you look at any successful brand in the marketplace, you will see that this branding is carried over into all areas of the company’s activity.
A good example that comes to mind is Apple. It is one of the most consistently branded companies in the world. From the design of their products to the quality of their advertising to the presentation of their products and the skills of their salespeople in their stores, there is a remarkable amount of synergy.
A lot of small businesses tend to shy away from studying very large companies since they believe that their marketing would never have any application. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every large company started as a small business. If you do enough research you will be able to see the history of how some of the world’s best companies got to be that way. Seeing how these businesses started and how they grew will provide excellent insight into the steps they went through to become successful.
Media: A great deal of branding and marketing these days is done online. Finding the right mix of media for your business can be done the hard way, through trial and error, or the much easier way, by hiring a digital media expert to plan a strategy for your business.
