Small business vs. large business

Whether you are a small business or a large business there are ways to approach marketing that should be standard. Here are a few of the basics.

1. Actually do marketing. A surprising amount of business folk out there still see marketing as a waste of money. These same doubters often rely on their own larger-than-life personality to sell and have not given marketing a chance to increase their business potential beyond what they can accomplish by themselves.

2. Look at the long-term (strategic approach). Marketing is not just about immediate sales but it can create the framework for a client/customer base for years to come.

3. Look at the short-term (immediate sales). Whether this is promoting a sale or it is the day-to-day sales, this cannot be overlooked so that both existing customers are not forgotten and potential customers can be added to the customer base.

4. The brand is sacred. Treat your brand with as much consistency and reverence as possible. It is not something to change on a whim or something that should be degraded visually or verbally for the sake of any immediate sales.

The ultimate goal of marketing should be growth for the business. No matter what size business you are, if you are not growing then one reason could be ineffectual marketing.

Market well,
-jeremy

simplicity is complex

As an undergrad art student, I remember being introduced to the minimalist art movement for the first time. These artists were made famous for such things as putting just a few squares on the canvas or leaving the canvas entirely blank. My first thought, like most artists who see them for the first time, was that I could have done that. Now, I’m not so sure.

For simplicity to work in art, there has to be a conscious decision to leave out elements. When faced with a blank canvas, it feels good to put all of your thoughts, energy and passion into making that canvas not blank anymore.

TIP: The goal of art is to express while the goal of marketing is to sell. Therefore, with marketing and design, simplicity is crucial for the viewer to focus on the message at hand. To do this, there needs to be a conscious decision to focus on a couple, or one, key element(s) and to leave out the extraneous information.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say you have a tee-shirt company in Oregon and you want to establish yourself in the market. You sell slim-fit shirts with age-old sayings on them. You only use organic cotton. You are a woman-owned business. You manufacture over 10,000 shirts a year. You sell to the western US. So, with that situation, what do you say in your marketing materials?

There are a few ways to slice this one, but you could say “Oregon Shirts, Organic Wisdom”. In other words, focus on one or a couple of items to put in the forefront of the marketing and put the other information as the secondary line of marketing (further within a brochure/website). The idea is to draw in the audience by the first marketing piece, thus, getting the audience onto further information to fully gain their trust in your product/company.

-jeremy

A big welcome to Powder Mountain!

As avid skiers (though there is a snowboarder among us), we are very proud to welcome Powder Mountain to the Wold Creative team. Working with some web development, branding and marketing strategies for Powder Mountain, Wold Creative Group is assisting with the guidance of growth of the ski resort so that it grows appropriately while still appealing its current customer-base.

We are very excited to be assisting Powder Mountain with its web development and marketing. If we must also have meetings on the slopes periodically this winter, then that is just a sacrifice that we are willing to make.

Here are a couple of Powder Mountain pics from this summer.

- jeremy

Target your audience

So you have a product or service that you are trying to sell. The avenues that you could take in order to market your product or service are innumerable. So what do you do? Do you use TV, radio, print, direct mail, interactive (online) marketing, telemarketing, yelling really loudly from your street corner?

First of all, as stated in previous posts, you need to take a step back from the medium (print, web, radio, etc.) and strategically look at your brand. What kind of company are you? Do you have any distinct features that stand out from competitors? Who is currently buying your product or service? What demographic do you think would resonate with your product or service?

TIP: This all comes down to targeting your audience. By answering some of the questions above (not a complete list there), you can start to figure out who your company should be marketing to. It is not a good idea to think that you should market to everybody because that is impossible and a waste of valuable resources. Instead, figuring out the audience that you should go after will create a situation where you are maximizing your marketing dollars and give you a greater return on your marketing investment.

-jeremy

service marketing is not a monologue

There is often a tendency within business to want to tell the public everything about itself or tell the public what to think. While this might actually be the way to go for some product-oriented marketing, let me give an analogy of what this might do for service-oriented marketing.

Imagine that your public viewing audience is another person that you are meeting for the first time at a party. The easiest way to cause a person at a party to NOT ask any questions about you would be just tell them everything there possibly is to know about you immediately. Not only is this slightly uncomfortable, it does not invite the person to engage you in a conversation.

TIP: Especially within the service-oriented business world, the goal of marketing is to be a catalyst to engage your potential clients in a dialogue in order to gain the trust of that potential client. It is usually only after trust has been established that a potential client moves to become an actual client. Trust comes from interaction or conversation and marketing is the opening line of that conversation.

-jeremy

stand apart

We live in a culture where we are bombarded by messages. Every product or service has their logo stamped on what they do, commercials remind us to buy things that we never knew we needed and the consumer is in the middle of it all. In such a competitive market for the consumer’s attention, how do you stand apart?

Simplicity and uniqueness are a good place to start. Focus on a simple, easy to understand message that highlights your unique characteristics as a business. It is OK to not tell the public everything there is to know about your business from the beginning. Giving too much info will cause the heart of what you do to be lost within the sea of messages. I made a quick grahpic, below, to highlight how this sort of marketing can be utilized.

-jeremy