Are You Getting Noticed by Print Customers?

Are you getting noticed by your print customers? Do you know how they found you?

I recently sat in on a client’s sales call with a prospect. When asked the proverbial “how did you hear about us?” question, the prospect answered, “I don’t know. You guys are everywhere.”

Well, they’re not actually everywhere. But they are in a lot of places. They:

• Frequently speak and display at major industry conferences
• Have an annual advertising agreement with an industry publication
• Send a weekly email newsletter that includes industry news, important topics, and a sprinkling of self-promotion
• Use targeted LinkedIn ad campaigns.

They are in a lot of places where customers spend their time.

It Took Seven Touches to be Remembered

When I was in business school in the late 80s, the common thinking was that it took seven touches for a person to recall a brand. In the 1970s, we only saw 500 to 1,600 ads per day. Today, the average American sees 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily, but we only notice fewer than 100 ads each day. Source: Red Crow Marketing

It is more difficult than ever to be remembered.

People aren’t online looking for ads to click on, so you need to put an ad in front of them many times before it will likely register with them. And even then, they may not be ready to click, even if it might look interesting. Digital advertising provides plenty of data that confirms this. A good rule of thumb for LinkedIn advertising is to show an ad to a person 5 to 10 times.

Even after clicking on an ad and maybe downloading a PDF, people might not remember your brand a few months later if this was their first encounter with you.

If someone is seeing up to 10,000 ads each day, how can you get noticed?

Build Trust

As I wrote earlier on Print Media Centr in Build Trust to Build Your Business, several things are needed to build trust:

• Show Competence
• Exhibit Integrity
• Be Dependable

The article listed several things that help support these. One way to be dependable is to show up consistently where your customers are prospects are. Ongoing advertising programs can help with this. It used to be that advertising was considered misleading and manipulative, but the truth is that advertising actually builds trust. The more ads someone is exposed to for your brand, the more familiar your brand becomes. The more familiar your brand, the more trusted it becomes.

Be Everywhere

We’ve been trained to ignore advertising, but repetition can break through this.  But there is a limit to how much attention we will pay to any ad and any marketing channel. This is why cross-media and multi-channel marketing perform much better than relying on any single marketing channel.

If you send three emails, two direct mails, leave three voice messages, are seen exhibiting at a tradeshow, and then someone clicks on an ad, fills out a form, and becomes a lead, were all your other efforts a waste of resources?

In the article Is This the Decade of Branding, I wrote that attributing the source of a lead is nearly impossible to discern.

It takes a lot of repetition for someone to become familiar with your brand. And a B2B buyer will not make a purchase until a need becomes a top priority. It is important to continually be in front of your potential buyers so you can be in the right place at the right time. Make them feel you are everywhere.

See all of Tod’s posts here