If you want to be in fashion this fall, grab a black leather T shirt, cropped white pants, and a wooly pink statement coat.
Style is different. It’s not about looking like everyone else or having the statement piece of the moment, and it doesn’t change from season to season.
Advertising is like fashion: it follows the trends, it’s designed to get attention, and you pay now for temporary results. It can be very effective, and it has a very clear message.
Ads are temporary and focused. Online ads are designed to encourage people to click through to your page where you sell them something.
People resist ads — unless they’re already interested. Ad blindness, our response as consumers to excessive ads in our lives, means that we usually don’t even see ads unless we’re already interested. Ad avoidance, the conscious decision to ignore or block ads, means we won’t engage with ads until we’re ready.
But sales resistance is not the same as shopping resistance. That’s where marketing comes in.
Marketing is like style: it’s permanent, authentic, and part of your company’s identity. Marketing is long-term and provides a less direct path to sales. If you’re a marketer, your job is to get people to know about your company and your products.
If you’re a salesperson, you might imagine that every touch can be a sale. But the main job of marketing is brand awareness and the development of trust. Your marketing should make people who see your ad pay attention to it. “Oh,” you want them to think, “that’s the company I’ve been hearing about” or “That’s the website where I found the answers to my questions.” Because they already know about and trust you, they’re more likely to click through.
At Haden Interactive, we believe that the best marketing is about doing a very good job and letting people know. That doesn’t mean your Facebook posts can be you trumpeting the triumphs of your company three times a day. And it certainly doesn’t mean using your ad copy for blog posts.
It means determining the authentic, useful message your company wants to share with potential and current customers, using media well to convey that message, and tracking the results with quantifiable data. Capture enough data to allow you to make good decisions for your company, and tweak your marketing plans to make sure that you’re communicating well with people and with search engines.
Then you can add that black leather tee… in the form of eye-catching, well-targeted ads that move you from brand awareness to sales.
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