Back in the early 70′s when I was growing up, I suspect marketing was like shooting fish in a barrel (not that I had ever tried that before, but the results sound pretty guaranteed). I remember we had one newspaper in town and three television stations that all ended at midnight. There were only a few radio stations people listened to. Keep in mind that I live in Hollywood Florida, which is between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. I was not out in the sticks. So now, fast forward 40 years later and the amount of marketing messages we get hit with every day should be overwhelming. 300+ cable channels, text ads, email ads, web pop up ads, banner ads, trucks driving around with billboards on them, LED billboards on the side of the roads that change the message each 6 seconds, terrestrial and satellite radio, oh my! So when I hear statistics about how many messages we are hit with each day, it’s no wonder that 99.99% of them are ignored by us. That’s right. I have figured out that you remember about one out of a thousand marketing messages.

To figure this out, one only has to look at the current statistics which I present below.

In the article ”Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists” by Michael Brower, PhD, and Warren Leon, PhD: “The average American is exposed to about 3000 advertising messages a day, and globally corporations spend over $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them.” Union of Concerned Scientists Website http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/guide.ch1.html

If you Google, you will see similar current statistics. So, how do we get noticed. I think one of the obvious answers is not to do exactly what everyone else is doing. Otherwise, you get lost in the crowd. If you are handing out your business card, hand out something with it at the same time. Have that object work as a tool for you so people will remember you and your message. In the past 2 years, “self” marketing is beating out “company” marketing. I’ll discuss this in another post. When I hand out my business card, I also hand out a pen with my contact information on it. Now, you might think “Hey, this is nothing new or effective” and you may be right if I had just stopped there but I did not. I put together a marketing bit that included a pen to get my message out. The pen has on the top, a silhouette of the face of a bald man with glasses. It looks like me. I had actually searched this out. Because I have been branding myself. So now when I hand a card out – I hand a pen out as well. The I hold the pen up to my head and say “Does this remind you of anyone?” Most of the time, people say “Hey, that’s you!”  So we have a good laugh and everyone is on their way. The only difference is that they will remember me and my message which I delivered to them after the laugh. No one else did that to them today. They now have an event or pleasurable memory of me and I now have started to own their mind-share on marketing and branding. This can be applied to almost any market. I’m not being in someone’s face or aggressive. I’m being smarter than the others that tried to touch them that day. This is the type of marketing I love. Using tools like nobody else to get a greater response. remember “You have to change your marketing because the old ways do not work anymore”.

So, look to min-share marketing, Multi-Stage marketing, Leverage marketing, Viral marketing, etc. to get your message out and customers in. This is where it is at. Not sending out 100,000 emails, but targeting your potential client and delivering your message on a consistent basis.

If you have any questions, please drop me a line.