Only the Big Boys Can Pull This Off!

Next to the Valley View Ferry

Richmond, Kentucky

Today I'm going to make a big, fat, ugly statement about the way business owners view marketing. I have been a business owner before and spent a lot of time trying to learn how to sell my wares on the Internet and in the local market. One of the things that I have learned is that a small business or even a medium to large business cannot rely on the same marketing tactics as a brand-name Corporation. Of course, I'm talking

about the superstars of the corporate world like IBM, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc. These companies have a brand that everybody recognizes so they can afford to just rely on funny commercials that don't really tell you much about the product. For anything smaller than these big corporations, it is almost a disaster to try to market yourself that way.  I have seen a lot of local car businesses advertise their wares by trying to be funny and quirky in this local economy and I cannot believe that they are selling anything by having dorky commercials that don't really tell you anything.

A business of this nature really needs to know how to tell their clients about what their product will do for them.  We really don't need to know about the family of the business, and we really don't need to know how long you would've been in business, but what we needed to know is how the product or service that you are pumping at us is going to benefit us or our needs.

I recently saw an ad online for a diet program that some bodybuilder was trying to promote.  Despite the entire page of ad copy he had down his webpage, the first half of it only talked about himself and what our muscles and body needed. The copy on the page merely talked about how our bodies supposedly worked and how this individual uncovered his almost secret method of making you lose weight.  I decided to list the benefits of what was being sold on the web advertisement and at the end of the entire page there was only about 5 to 7 benefits that I could list after analyzing it.  I took the liberty of getting some old ad copy on similar products that were done in the 50s and 60s and started listing the benefits in those ads, and by golly, there were 20 to 30 benefits at least on a single advertisement.

The point I'd like to make is that most people that sell products or services don't even know the benefits of what their product can do for the public. I'm not talking about features such as the color or shape of something, but I am talking about what it can actually do for that consumer that is considering purchasing it.  If you cannot identify all of the benefits that a person could get from using your product or service then you are missing the boat, and by the way, you need to find the main benefit that would drive a person to purchase your product.  You need to find the main hot button and other hot buttons that will push a person to want to use your product or service.

The only way that you will be able to do that is by telling while you are selling.  The more you tell the more you sell; you cannot do that with a short commercial that shows a couple of guys dressed in clown suits goofing around in front of a bunch of cars that you are trying to sell.

It just doesn't work that way.

Mark "Elmo" Ellis