You know as well as I do that local advertisers can be tricky customers.
Selling them into advertising on any media can be challenging - often they’ll give it a go for a month or two, only to give up because they don’t feel like they’ve got the return they should have.
But in my career, I’ve discovered something important; something that has helped to sell more advertising and develop more long-term relationships with good quality clients.
An educated buyer is a better buyer.
The more educated your buyer is about how what they’re buying fits into the grand scheme of things, the easier it is to manage their expectations, deliver success for them and retain them.
And it’s our job to educate them. For me, that education always starts with a simple but profound principle:
The best known always beats the best.
Local businesses don’t like to hear that. They’d prefer to think that if they just keep doing a great job, they’ll beat off the competition.
But as you and I know, that just isn’t true.
Only by regular, consistent, advertising and marketing does someone become one of the best-known companies for whatever it is they sell.
And when you become one of the best-known companies for what you sell, guess what? You’ll sell a lot more.
The point here is that effective marketing strategy isn’t short-term. It isn’t focused on trying to get a few customers through the door before the end of the month.
It’s an overall, consistent effort to elevate your positioning to the best known in your market, and this necessitates regular advertising over an extended period of time.
When a local advertiser does this, they’ll start to see greater results than the short-term efforts that other local businesses dabble in, and from our perspective, they become far better clients for us.
How well are you educating your clients about the importance of becoming the best known?
