Answers by: Dave Lapp
What is advertising? How is that different than marketing? Which should come first?
Join advertising and marketing guru Dave Lapp, with Fuze Design, as he takes on the hard questions about this subject. This is part two of a continued series of articles dedicated to Branding, Marketing, and Web and Social Media Development. Although slightly different in nature than previous Panel Discussions, with only one expert per part, this one is worth spending some time with.
As you may know, just because an ad campaign costs a lot of money doesn’t say it will be effective, and just because certain campaigns are cheap, doesn’t always make them a great option. With all the gazillions of options for advertising out there, it’s very easy to lose perspective on reality and spend much more than is even possible or realistic.
Join us on a captivating journey as we explore the ins and outs of Advertising and Marketing, with Dave as our guide
Dave, his wife Kate, and son Anthony live on a small farm in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Dave is the owner of Fuze Design LLC and loves the challenge of advertising and helping his clients grow. He occasionally comes across as an angry pen-wielding visionary entrepreneur but prefers to view himself as a miner in search of a treasure called truth. He is passionate about sharing his discoveries with other entrepreneurs. Join him on the journey by subscribing to his free weekly newsletter where you’ll see the latest thoughts and brainstorms. Just send the word ‘subscribe’ to [email protected].
Can you tell me the difference between marketing and advertising?
Marketing is the core of business. It includes sales, advertising, customer service, and using customer feedback for improvement. In short, marketing is a cycle of listening to the customer and then delivering what they are asking for. If your marketing is based on the wrong assumptions, then even the best advertising won’t be able to sell anything.
Advertising is delivering the right message to the right people. There’s one rule. It needs to make you money, not cost you money.
When you think about setting up an advertising campaign for a client, what are some things you feel are important?
Creating a contact list of your own is extremely important. Just get all your customer and lead information on a digital spreadsheet or database. This is your tribe. The power of the tribe lies in the permanent access you have to primary contact information like email, phone numbers, and mailing addresses.
Many times, the tribe isn’t big enough so we need grow it. We do that with advertising and all the ads will be focused on one thing, getting new people into your tribe. At this point you’re not asking them to adopt a puppy you’re just asking folks to raise their hand if they like puppies.
You’ll also want to recognize that you don’t have enough marketing money to reach everyone. 99.9% of the population doesn’t want what you have. It’s the other .1% that you want to reach.
For a long time, I struggled to describe a target market. The breakthrough came when I realized that my ideal customer is the one that follows me to the very top of the value ladder (more on that later). In a perfect world, every cent of your marketing dollar would be used to deliver your message to this ideal customer.
There are lots of tricks that help an ad go from mediocre to great! Legendary copywriter Gary Halbert taught that ads need four integrated components to be successful. The success of an ad doesn’t have as much to do with pleasing colors and design as the ability to catch attention and deliver a message.
can be painful, but there are things you can do to alleviate that pain. If you did your job well in the last three steps your audience will have a much lower resistance. Pain and procrastination go hand in glove and even the tiniest amount of pain will get your audience to wait. That’s why you need to ask them to take action now. It’s fairly easy to switch it to a positive note by giving them something like free shipping or a free gift in return for making the commitment right away.
What about big-ticket purchases?
Sometimes the customer can’t buy immediately. Great question! All businesses are, or should be, service businesses. You guys aren’t selling puppies you’re providing furry companionship. Real estate agents aren’t selling houses, they’re providing security and comfort. Like Theadore Levitt said, “The customer doesn’t want a drill bit, she wants a hole.”
When you begin looking at your business as a service you start seeing other ways you can help your customers reach their goals. Many times, you can give or sell education. Education is often cheap for you but valuable to the customer. Selling tutorial videos and “What You Should Know” type of material is a great way to add value to the customer before and after the sale.
Coming full circle to your question. Instead of selling only big-ticket items try adding less expense options to capture spur-of-the-moment dollars. There are few things better at building trust than transactions where the customer feels like he was treated well.
Having multiple services for the same customer is what I call a value ladder.
How do you relate and sell to the contacts that are already in your tribe?
These contacts are on the bottom rung of the value ladder. We got them there by offering something in exchange for their contact information. The next rung on the ladder could be some type of information to purchase or service that they would be interested in. The following rung may be a puppy purchase. The final rung could be a subscription-based kennel membership or something like that. The more rungs you put in your ladder the more times you can sell to the same customer.
Because you own your tribe’s contacts you can place a message in front of them regularly and economically. The key is to provide enough value each time you contact them so that they remain interested and don’t opt out.
Do you have any practical advice on how a dog breeder can get started using the value ladder concept?
Yes, the power behind the value ladder also does the heavy lifting in a sales funnel. A sales funnel is really just a mini value ladder but it’s pointed toward a product that is on one of the higher rungs of the value ladder.
For example, we could start with a Google Ad advertising a free report called Ten Things You Should Do Before Buying a Poodle. When the customer goes to download the report, they’re given a one-time opportunity to purchase a $20 tutorial video called Puppy Personality 1.0. As a bonus for purchasing the tutorial the customer gets a $200 gift card to your kennel. A day later you reach out to this customer via email or phone (you harvested this info when they downloaded the free report) to see if they have any questions about poodles in general. Eventually the customer schedules a visit to your kennel and purchase a puppy. Even if it doesn’t end in a sale, you still get some income. There are some sales funnels that are so good that the products sold on the front end ($20 tutorial) generate enough income to pay all the Google Ads! Once you have a funnel that is this good, you can scale it up almost indefinitely because it literally doesn’t cost you anything to advertise!
Just a warning. The first funnel you create probably won’t work this well, but keep trying new offers, new front-end products, and new methods of communication.
Are there restrictions to how you use channels like email, phone, and mail?
Always provide an easy way to opt-out of future messages. Emails are also required to have the full physical address of your business. Text messaging can be used but most lead management software requires that the contact personally opts-in. Consult an attorney to see if specific practices are legal in your area. You may occasionally get a nasty reply message. Just kindly cull them from the tribe and don’t take it too personally.
Do you have other tools that you would recommend?
One of our biggest successes has been the lowly newsletter. It is one of the most economical and effective ways of adding value to your tribe and keeping them warmed to you. We are in the process of creating newsletters for a few dog breeders and we are excited to see the results. Another one, believe it or not, is classified ads. In many ways Google Ads is a modern day of classified ad. Remember, the number one goal is to harvest contact information.
In the past you have taken a strong stance against branding. Can you explain?
Ahhh! Branding is one tool in the advertising toolbox and not the complete package as it tends to be presented. The place that I really butt heads with the brand recognition crew is where small businesses are told they need to spend large amounts of money on projects that don’t directly contribute to making a sale. You need your website to look nice, yes. Do you need to spend $2,000 dollars to build a twelve-page manual on using your colors, logo, and slogans? No! There’s nothing wrong with spending a lot of money on advertising as long as you know that the money is coming back to you with interest in the near future.
In the dog breeding industry, what are some ideas for creative advertising/ marketing?
Advertising is creative by default – it must be to catch attention. What I would love to see in the pet industry is creativity in marketing. How about totally rethinking how we sell puppies?
How about advertising that you run a full background check on every prospective customer? What about insisting on selling two puppies if the family doesn’t have a second dog. This will turn some people away but the folks that remain will be diehard enthusiasts. Turning your tribe into fans isn’t easy but it could be very, very profitable.
I recently heard of a very innovative way of raising puppies. Some kennels are beginning to lease dogs. The customer pays for a female puppy (sometimes at a reduced price). Every year the customer is required to bring the puppy back to the kennel. Once the dog is old enough, she’ll be bred and then the customer will care for her and the puppies. The kennel gets to sell the pups once they are old enough to be away from their mother. This my dear folks, is genius. The kennel has more puppies to sell, the customer has a pet and the help and advice of a professional dog breeder, and the dog is well socialized and cared for.
I’m sure there are downsides to a program like this but someone was being creative. Someone wasn’t okay with just doing it the same way everyone else was doing it. Someone decided to try something based on a hunch. Best of all, somebody asked the question, “What does the customer really want?”
What do you see as the biggest obstacle in the path of creative advertising?
In most industries the biggest misconception is that you are somehow entitled to eager customers and I don’t think the dog industry is free of this. Just because you have the best dogs and the nicest website doesn’t make you entitled to anything. Money moves for its own reasons, and until we align ourselves with those reasons we are fighting (and probably losing out) against the current. Once you understand the product, the service, and the emotion that your customer desires, then, and only then you’ll be able to align yourself.
Hopefully we’ve sparked some new ideas in your mind and some of them probably look overwhelming and impossible. It’s okay to start in small. Start by implementing one idea and build from there. The key word is start.
Are you ever confused when it comes to branding, marketing, and advertising? Do you feel like you can’t make sense of it all? How do we know what’s working and what’s not working? How do we know advertising isn’t just a waste of money?
Well, our goal is to break these different subjects down in a continued series of Panel Discussions over the course of the next few issues. Some subjects might only have one
