Marketing: Don’t be a turkey and play follow the leader

What makes you think your competition’s marketing is working for them?

I talk to clients often about monitoring the competition. They clip out newspaper ads and keep direct mail pieces of the ads that their competitors are doing. However, one of the biggest mistakes people make is advertising in publications just because their competitors are in them.

Don’t be a turkey.

Don’t think that all your competitors are there because their ads are producing great results. They’re more likely to be there because everyone else is and most of them won’t have a good system to tell whether their ads are working.

A newspaper and yellow pages sales tactic you need to know

If a newspaper or yellow pages can get one or two of your competitors to advertise, they will call you up and tell you how you’ll lose out if you don’t advertise too. In fact, this is a well known sales trick used by the people selling ad space. Yellow pages and newspaper reps do it all the time.

What they fail to mention is that your competitors probably never test their advertising, often haven’t got a clue how to market and are only advertising because they are playing follow the leader. This is a highly effective way to sustain the advertising industry.

It’s not a great way for you to run your business.

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Chris Mitchell is the President and Founder of 25-8 Marketing, Inc, a full service advertising agency that plans and implements marketing programs for small to medium-sized businesses. He is a consultant, speaker and author and has worked with hundreds of companies. He has over 20 years of real-world advertising experience, and understands the marketing challenges of the small business owner.

website: http://www.258marketing.com
email: chris@258marketing.com

Another nail in the coffin of print and yellow page advertising

Newspapers, books and magazines, as we know them today, will become a thing of the past. I saw a product that convinced me. Amazon’s Kindle is going to revolutionize print advertising. So…What is the Kindle?

Launched by Amazon in November 2007, this is a cross between a laptop and cellphone. The electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper. There are no cables, and no syncing. Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle, whether you’re in the back of a taxi, at the airport, or in bed.

When you buy a book and it is auto-delivered wirelessly in less than one minute. More than 100,000 books are available, including more than 90 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers. Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes are all auto-delivered wirelessly.

The Kindle is lighter and thinner than a typical paperback; weighs only 10.3 ounces. It has a long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours. Unlike WiFi, Kindle utilizes the same high-speed data network (EVDO) as advanced cell phones so you never have to locate a hotspot.

Oh, by the way, they run about 400 bucks, and they can’t keep up with demand.

So what does it all mean to advertising? Well, as we move toward a more paperless society, and have the computer, internet, and Kindle-type technology, I can forsee a slow but certain death to published Yellow Pages, newspapers, magazines (replaced even as we speak by e-zines) and published books.

Get your website up and optimized…it’s all headed that way.

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Chris Mitchell is the President and Founder of 25-8 Marketing, Inc, a full service advertising agency that plans and implements marketing programs for small to medium-sized businesses. He is a consultant, speaker and author and has worked with hundreds of companies. He has over 20 years of real-world advertising experience, and understands the marketing challenges of the small business owner.

website: http://www.258marketing.com
email: chris@258marketing.com