Chairman of the Board
Summer's well underway which means you'll find yourself at the edge of a pool or other body of water sometime soon. If you're lucky enough to find a pool with a deep end and—even rarer these days—a diving board, don't miss your chance to make a splash. Sure, peel off a few of your signature splashless swan dives first, but then take the opportunity to wake up nearby pool-goers with a depth-charge-like cannonball that sends a tsunami of sunbather-soaking spray to the far corners of the pool deck.
Summer is a great time to plan for making a big splash with your company's brand, too. A new ad campaign, tradeshow displays, website revamp—the watery wake up call to your current and potential customers can take many forms, but how you execute its development comes down to two opposite approaches.
The Branding Bellyflop
To make a splash you must focus on reach, correct? Reach out to as many audiences as possible with all the marketing tools and messages that your budget can muster. The problem with this approach is, quite simply, its results. Hurling your brand out there while reaching out with one method here and another method there leaves you as spread out and unfocused as, well, the guy in the picture above. Your impact on the marketplace will be an ineffectual and painful bellyflop.
Maximum Impact
The key to supreme splashiness is not so much the methods, but the message. Tightly focusing on what your brand is saying and displaying, not how it's delivered, is like focusing your body into a tight, explosive cannonball that sends shockwaves well beyond the initial point of impact.
A post won't be shared simply because it's posted. An ad won't be remembered simply because it's run. Spending your time and, yes, money on developing the right message that truly captivates your audience and radically differentiates your brand from all others is the only way to see lasting results.
Method Madness
Then why, you ask, do so many marketing and advertising firms make method the centerpiece of their approach? Because method is easy: learn the steps, sell the steps. Message is harder. It's art as much, maybe more, than science. People respond to captivating art, ideas, and other eyebrow-raising messages. It tickles their brains. A keyword optimized demographically-cross-sectioned inbound marketing initiative...doesn't. Firms that offer the art of captivation are a little harder to find. To make it easier, I put Captivation right in the name of mine. You're welcome.
Putting your marketing plan together for the fall? Feel free to CONTACT me anytime when you're ready to make a (captivating) splash with your target audiences.
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