It’s hard to get excited about dry cleaning. So how can you convince potential customers that your approach to what they see as a commodity service is different?
Morellis Cleaners was a new chain that took dry cleaning to a new level. Forget the images of steamy, stinky roomfuls of strange machinery and employees who looked like they’d been steamed for hours. The company had attractive spaces staffed by knowledgeable employees who took time to educate customers about dry cleaning.
You operate a century-old restaurant that everyone loves, but often forgets when faced with all sorts of well-advertised chains. How do you bring people back to the table?
Shapiro’s Delicatessen has been serving corned beef and pastrami sandwiches and other Kosher-style deli fare to Indianapolis residents since Louis Shapiro found his way to the Circle City just after the turn of the last century. The restaurant was still a local favorite (and even managed to impress visiting New Yorkers), but saw its business facing tougher competition.
If you’re selling a high-quality product in a category that’s considered to be a commodity, how can you set yourself apart?
Plymate Image Mats provides a higher-quality product with far superior service in a market that’s saturated with – and accustomed to – low-end competitors. Their challenge is twofold: convince prospects that they need more than what they’re already buying, then sell it to them.
How do you convince people that your business is truly a part of the community when they only associate you with death and sadness?
Like most family-owned funeral homes, Ziemer Funeral Homes had been experiencing growing pressure from roll-ups of local competitors and other national chains. They wanted to remind potential customers that they are truly local businesspeople who hope to serve the community for decades to come.
How do you catch the attention of people who spend all their time trying to catch the attention of others?
The pioneer in management information systems for the advertising agency industry, Adman faced aggressive competition from programs that weren’t as comprehensive or targeted, but appeared to be more affordable.
How do you convince mothers-to-be that your local hospital is a better place for giving birth than the big-city hospitals that are just a short (if frenzied) drive away?
Bloomington Hospital faced just that situation in trying to promote its maternity services. They knew that a hospital’s image is particularly important when it come to maternity. Parents-to-be labor to choose the right site for their arrivals. With powerful challengers less than an hour away, this hospital needed a campaign that could deliver.
You’ve started running a new ad. You think it’s a good one, and based on the early response, your target audience appears to agree.
And then the phone rings or the email appears. One or more people are clearly upset with you. They don’t understand why you ran such an offensive ad. They’ve found something objectionable in the visual, or perhaps in the words. They’ve taken offense at something you never considered. You didn’t plan to upset anyone! Now what should you do?
One of the first lessons in learned in marketing is one of the easier to understand. It’s one of the most durable, timeless pieces of advice. It’s been promoted experts of all stripes. And yet, it’s one of the most consistently ignored.
When people read your ad, your press release, your email, or your website, what exactly do you want them to do?
Another simple way to gauge your copy’s potential effectiveness is to highlight it in two different colors. Whether you’re developing a letter, a brochure, a web page, or any other channel, take a few moments to highlight all of the sentences that are really about your customer and his or her needs. Let’s do that in pink. Next, highlight all the sentences that are about your company and what it does in yellow.
Now look at the page. What color is your page?
There’s a company from which I’ve been buying products off and on for the better part of three decades. I bought when they were primarily a catalog marketer, and kept buying after they made the move online. I don’t buy a lot from them — maybe something once every three or four years — but enough so they continue to stay in contact.
But I’m about to break off that contact and press the evil unsubscribe button. Why? Because whoever is in charge of their online marketing strategy seems to believe that the best way to maintain my loyalty is to stuff my emailbox with email after email — and the frequency keeps increasing.