Why don't you advertise often...?
It’s something we hear people say, “We never see an Aktileda advert. If you’re a marketing agency surely we should see your advertising everywhere!!”
There are two reasons that we don’t advertise that much. Firstly, our advertising is designed to be sufficient to give us a media presence, and no more. So, if you need us, we’re easy enough to find, just Google us. Secondly, and most importantly, a marketing business requires a very different style of marketing and advertising from the main stream service or manufacturing industries.
Let me explain. Our business doesn’t manufacture products that must be advertised to be sold, which sounds odd, but it’s true. We manufacture the adverts, so the products we manufacture must be sold to our clients before they can be advertised! OK, now take a step on. There’s no such thing as a second hand advert. They are used and discarded. Other peoples’ adverts are no use to you; obviously there is no point in buying someone else’s advert, so how do you fix their value?
Our work isn’t particularly exciting. It’s not shark cage diving or sky diving; it’s sitting in front of a computer creating images and writing text for ads and blogs. Not much to get excited about really.
It gets worse. When you think about it, marketing has very little practical use; you can’t eat it, wear it or live in it. Even if you could buy 1 kg of marketing, spreading it on your business would have no immediate visible effect. So a marketing agency works from a very difficult position. To market a marketing agency we need to promote a boring business that makes products of little practical use that have minimal effect, before anyone can see them. In other words, the business of marketing is the difficult business to market. So how do we do it?
We actually apply our own rules to the problem. Let’s start with a simple question.
Question #1: Does the business need a small number of regular clients or a large number of occasional clients?
Answer #1: Marketing is a long-term, continual and relentless process. We need a small number of regular clients.
Now let’s turn this into a practical situation. Let’s imagine that Aktileda was a client and he had asked us to market Aktileda Marketing. Answering that one simple question has given us the direction his marketing should take. Don’t waste time or money advertising to a million potential clients if you need only a few regular clients to sustain your business. Better to spend some time researching local businesses. We would make a list of the businesses that we believed could benefit from Aktileda services. Then we would book an appointment to meet with the business decision maker, show him a success story (we have several!) and discuss how we could facilitate a marketing strategy that would work for him.
People often forget that in the right context, booking meetings with decision makers is a more efficient marketing tool than a Million Rand advertising campaign.
And now you know why we don’t advertise much...!
