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Business Marketing Strategies

"The Differences Between Smart Marketing and Dumb Marketing"

by Peter Geisheker, CEO, The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm (920) 592-9595

As the CEO of a marketing firm, I see bad marketing everyday. The most common mistake I see is what I call, "me too" marketing.

"Me too" marketing is when a business produces a marketing piece that looks and reads like an exact replica of their competitions marketing. Instead of demonstrating why their service or product is special and offers amazing benefits, they say exactly what their competition says.

For proof of "me too" marketing, go to your yellow pages and look at advertising in almost any category. You can basically exchange the company names in the ads and the ads are identical. Nearly everybody is using the same boring clichés such as, "Our customers are #1", "Serving your needs for 10 years", "Family owned", "Best Service", "Friendly Service", "Great Selection", etc. This kind of advertising is SO DULL and overused. That is why it produces such lousy results. If you want to have marketing that produces a lot of quality leads and puts you ahead of your competition, you need to be different and prove why your product or services offers the best benefits to your customer.

To create marketing that repeatedly generates high quality leads, here is a list of the differences between great marketing and terrible marketing:

* Great Marketing focuses on a powerful benefits-based sales message and promise. Bad marketing focuses on artistic graphic design and being "cute and creative" and using as little sales text as possible. A great sales message is a message that promises a specific result. For example, "If our skin care product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, well give you a 110% refund!"

* Great marketing includes an attention-grabbing headline that calls out to the target market and makes a benefit-based promise. Bad marketing does not include a headline and hopes the reader will find the graphics interesting enough to read the marketing piece. Big mistake!

* Great marketing uses client testimonials to give proof of the quality of a product or service. Bad marketing does not. How many times have you purchased a product because you read a lot of customer testimonials praising the quality of the product? I know I have. Testimonials are one of the most influential marketing tools you can use, so take advantage of testimonials and use them in ALL of your marketing. You will instantly generate more sales.

* Great marketing offers quantitative proof of why a product or service is superior to the competition. Bad marketing just says, We are the best. For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than the competition, your marketing should make statements that you can prove such as, "our widget lasts 3.7 times longer", "t costs 27% less", "our company offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no guarantee", "our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee", etc. You need to make your marketing promise so powerful that people would have to be a fool to do business with anybody but you.

* Great marketing asks the customer to purchase by a specific date and explains step-by-step how to place an order. Bad marketing does NOT ask the customer to buy and does not have a time-limit for the offer. To make your marketing great, you must ask for the order and give a specific time-limit for taking advantage of the offer. For example, "Buy our widget by June 30 and get an instant 10% off", or, "Buy our widget by June 30 and get a second widget at half price." You may think this is a cliché but it works over and over. That is why you see it used so often on TV, particularly in infomercials and other direct-response advertising. I promise you that these companies would not be making these offers if it was not leading to a lot of sales and profits.

If you apply these simple strategies to your marketing, I guarantee that you will see an increase in sales.

If you would like help marketing your new product, call (920) 592-9595 or email us.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker
President & CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
(920) 592-9595