Advertising principles that are useful for all entrepreneurs
Since marketing, advertising, and sales are interlinked to the success of any startup, it’s critical to understand how the principles of any one of the areas help in the growth of the startup overall. For example, an effective ad and an effective pitch often have commonalities that the startup can learn from and execute in their own setup. If you are a brilliant engineer, IT/tech wizard, or an industry insider, you can learn from these advertising principles to effectively grow your company:
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Focusing on the customer
Quite often, advertising meetings go towards the idea of brainstorming and coming up with ideas that are appealing to the customer. For example, what’s trending, or what’s something our niche audience enjoys consuming? It’s the very chain of thought that you should be incorporating in your production line as well. Is this product innovation something that my customer truly cares about? Is this new font or new feature something that my customer will pay extra for? Questions like these make you think like an ad-man, and uncover hidden insights into the minds of your paying customers. For example, if you’re in the agri-farming space, is giving away a discount the best way to attract an audience, or is focusing on the ecological benefits a better one?
Communicate a single message
This is applicable to companies that may not even be in the B2C space, and are only focusing on customer-relations as a source of revenue. It’s highly regarded in deep research that when the company speaks one language and one message, it positively impacts the company multifold. Similar to how a 10-second spot has one message and one story, so should the rest of your brand. If you think about Virgin Airlines, can you differentiate it from United Airlines? You can. Because, much like their founders, they have one message and one persona in the minds of the customers. One is cheap and affordable, and the other is fun and exciting. Depending upon your mode of travel, you select one over the other when making the final choice.
Market Research
An overlooked component of any business plan and advertising pitch, market research is one of the key areas where numbers often become fudged and data is misinterpreted. You can skip this step altogether if you want to build a company out of thin air, and you will see that market research is the one factor that separates the good from the ugly. If you only look at numbers released from the industry research houses, you lose out on the qualitative analysis you can achieve from actually talking to your audience. Much like an advertising professional will conduct field studies, as a startup CEO, you too will have to step outside your office or home and talk to crowds of people about what they feel about your product.
Call to Action
This is mostly an online advertising principle, which focuses on the idea that every creative needs to be high-impact and have strong recall. Along with that, it needs to ask the customer for something. A call-to-action is something that the customer needs to partake in after they’ve viewed your ad or heard your pitch. If you talk to your suppliers, vendors, and clients and your message doesn’t resonate with them to take action, then you need to go back to the basics and figure out why your message didn’t have enough of a call-to-action.
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