Silent Company Killers Part 3

A while back I was driving and suddenly I noticed that the car’s heat gauge came up really fast! I switched off the engine and luckily there was an open spot next to the road so I could pull over.

After a lot of investigation I isolated what the problem was. There is a small device that is supposed to open up when the water that pushes against it reaches a certain temperature and for some reason it was faulty. Luckily I saw the heat coming up, otherwise the whole engine would have overheated and would have cost a lot of money to fix. Whereas this small device cost the same as a plate of food.

When it comes to your business’ marketing and sales divisions there are also a lot of parts. You could generally have a good system, but one part that is not working could be the difference between howling success or disaster.

The internet has a sea of information and opinions about different things and every second day another marketing or sales gimmick enters the market making huge claims. So how do we know what to use and what to ignore?

The answer is not an easy one, but I will share with you the  basic fundamental laws that, when applied exactly, will leave you with a fine-tuned machine that helps your company travel safely on the road to your dream destinations.

The first two vital laws about marketing are: If you or your marketing team want to communicate effectively about a service or product to you audience it is very important that the people involved understand the product or service well. To communicate effectively to your audience in your marketing you also have to have a really good understanding of the audience you are trying to communicate to. If you know the information in regards to the above vital laws, crafting a successful marketing campaign becomes relatively easy. This is the foundation on which you build the rest. 

It does take some time, but it is absolutely vital to do a lot of research in regards to your target audience. Fortunately there are many tools available today to do this.

A very key and easily overlooked tool is to get some surveys done. This will give you some very valuable insights as to people’s ideas and attitudes towards certain things and will give you actionable information for your marketing campaigns.

Study the market and competitors thoroughly, and also follow key companies or people you are looking to do business with on social media. Once you have followed them you will see their posts in your feed. This will also give you some very valuable insights. Keep in mind this is an ongoing process. You should always look to learn more about your target audience.

Once you have a good understanding of your audience it is easy to give the copy writing and marketing team or agency some information about your service and product. The key point here is to make sure they actually understand it. They do not need to know all the technical information about it, just to really understand what it does and how it will help the client.

Whether you are talking about a website, flier, email or video it has to do three things successfully to achieve the purpose of marketing.

It has to:
– Grab attention
– Generate interest
– Get your message across

In that order. This is true about your copy, but if you also apply this in your design and artwork you will have created a double impact and it will most certainly get results if you have done your research and surveys correctly.

Let’s take an example of this. If you arrived at you desk and in the middle of the desk stood a little bottle with a note in it. It would grab your attention as it is out of the ordinary. Then you would look at the bottle and see that you cannot make out who it is from or what is written on the note inside. Next you would open it and read the message.

Whoever sent you that would have accomplished their mission – getting the message across to you.

Some people focus on the message so much that they totally abandon the design, which leaves you with something that comes across very mediocre and can give a bad impression of the company.

Some people focus so much on the design that they completely miss the mark in delivering the message.

Here at Impact Animated Videos we work on both, as they are both important! A great video that grabs attention, generates interest and gets the message across to your audience is all we are interested in.

So we have covered some really fundamental things so far. We have looked at the research aspect of knowing the product or service you are trying to market and then making sure you understand the audience. Building on that we have looked today at the key elements of a successful marketing campaign and the sequence of those elements.

Now lets look at some guiding rules and important information when it comes to quality.

It might seem obvious, but the first guiding rule is to actually try and sell your product or service or to get them to take some kind of a step. So there needs to be some call to action. The key word here is action! I am sure you have seen some magazine ads where there is some pretty girl and somewhere in the picture there is a perfume with a single line of text, but that’s it… It might build some awareness that your product exists, but you will not achieve much more than that unfortunately. 

The second guiding rule is don’t make false claims. I know there is a lot of information floating around like “fake it ’till you make it” etc. but the truth is that lying about some aspect of your company or service is not a good idea. It lays you open for attack and most people, when they find out you had falsely advertised, will never do business with you. With the speed of communication on the internet, social media etc. you can get a pretty good idea how damaging this could be to your company. The last thing I want to touch on today is quality. A badly researched, boring, cliche-ridden marketing campaign can cause a lot of damage to your company. We see this quite often, where someone chooses to work with an animated video company based on price as the only qualifier. They end up with a video that doesn’t get their message across and looks cheap. So essentially without realizing it, they have gone and paid money to damage their company. I hope that helps and I would love to hear if you have something to ad!