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Marketing 101

Being informed is likely the most beneficial action a business owner can take.

Bootstrap boils down a complex industry and focuses on sifting through the options, explaining how these tools and areas of expertise should interact and potentiate each other. We strive to educate small businesses about the priorities professionals consider so that business owners can make informed decisions with their money.

Avoid wasting money on tools that don’t have potential

Understanding the need and purpose of marketing services and the tools professionals create to communicate with the public is essential for business owners to market their business competitively. It is particularly important for small businesses to recognize the realistic potential, value, and limitations of the tools at their disposal in order to utilize marketing campaign strategy.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is defined as “the management process through which goods and services move from concept to customer”. This process starts with research on target customer demographics and competition which leads to an encompassing vision, the formulation of a plan to connect with potential customers effectively, and crafting an idea into a message that can be used on promotional tools that are created in a specific order.

This resulting message must comply with the existing business identity, mission, and general values and be communicated in terms that are reflective of the identity, needs, and considerations of the audience being targeted in advertising materials.

Marketing is not the creation or utilization of an advertisement or promotional tool, it is a fundamental component of business itself.

Bootstrap is a full service marketing firm that not only provides promotional tools, but collaborates with business owners to formulate a marketing and business plan, managing assets to work in concert along each phase of our proprietary process.

Responsible Advertising

There are a myriad of advertising techniques that can be used to influence the population. Bootstrap recognizes these as very effective, and condemns the all too frequent abuse of this knowledge in the marketing industry. We feel it is our moral responsibility as advertisers to proceed with caution when using these methods. Bootstrap requires clients to fairly and honestly represent their business without an abuse of power occurring. We provide this information as education on the marketing industry and insight into the tactics that competitors might be employing. Bootstrap believes the best tactic is to honestly communicate with an audience that has real need for a business, service, or product, and our job is to connect our clients with that audience. We hold the opinion that many of these strategies are unfair manipulations of the public and the psychology of the human brain.

Who should your customers be?

Honesty and loyalty are connected

Your customer should be defined as an individual or group that is or has potential to be interested in services or products that your business provides or can be convinced to become a customer without dishonesty or misrepresentation.

Assuming that all advertising assets are properly created and implemented, capturing the attention of an audience can still be an obstacle if the audience doesn’t understand the value of what a business provides. Also assuming that a business is providing a quality product with honesty and transparency, this is a problem with an easy solution.

Businesses must educate the public about the value of what they provide

Presenting an explanation of what a business provides is often not enough to convert customers. The public must understand why a business is necessary, why what they provide is valuable, and above all, why the potential customer needs it. For honest businesses with quality products or services, this is easily done through proper marketing assets that then communicate this missing information, easily converting customers with sound logic.

Are you reaching your audience?

Marketing materials that are seen by a specific audience are not the same as marketing materials that target an audience specifically. In order to successfully target an audience, an understanding of the needs, desires, behaviors, budgets, values and obstacles a demographic faces must be considered. Including the unique preferences of different demographics and creating tools that reflect those preferences in aesthetic, messaging, and function is the key to successful advertising and therefore customer conversion.

Common Mistakes:

Hoping to incorporate all demographics into one pool by advertising a singular non specific message is much less effective than creating targeted ad campaigns and such materials risk being ignored or overlooked.

Using aesthetics that reflect the preferences of the owner, not the audience they are trying to attract can actively repel customers away from businesses and become an obstacle of its own.

Simple Example – Color choice – Assumption: You like green but your audience is repelled for whatever reason. Instead of facing the obstacle of convincing the audience that your business is worthy of their money, you now ALSO need to be convincing about green being a great color, even though you are targeting an audience that is inclined to think not, but more importantly, you will have to convince this audience that you care about them, even though you have just ignored their preference. They will believe this dismissal extends to their interaction with your business. Imagine what can happen when this concept is applied to the larger aesthetic or worse, messaging.

Marketing tools are not an extension of the self but a form of communication. Remember who you are talking to.

Research

It is important to keep in mind that all advertising assets are a means to communicate with the public and in order to capture the attention of an audience, one must know how to communicate well using these tools. Researching the audience gives businesses a head start in this conversation, and advertisements will be more attractive to audiences that feel understood and considered.

Over the last 100 years, an increasing number of studies have been performed, looking at what motivates purchasing, how to best speak to different audiences, and even assessing how eyes track across advertisements. Using this information and demographic specific research allows many advantages to businesses when communicating with the public. It can be quite beneficial to understand the considerations of the customer before they come to you, but it is essential to incorporate research and demographic information in advertising. When combined with the known psychology of art and language, advertising tools can be created to cause predictable responses and actions. This is why each tool needs to have a specific purpose and goal for a targeted viewer in order to reach its full potential.

Competition

Competition is often perceived as the opposition or even the enemy, however an examination of our competition produces accurate and informative data that can be quite beneficial. Researching competition can save your company the costly time and effort that comes from learning lessons from experience and often can replace expensive focus group testing with matched results. Studying the successes and failures of businesses that are similar to your own is a valuable asset to any business, especially in a saturated marketplace.