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Marketing message x Credibility x Visibility = Marketing Success

These three variables, when working positively together, create success. Period. But determining how to get those variables to work together is the trick.

Your marketing message isn’t a static entity. It can have a high or low impact on your customers. There are numerous factors at work. Often times, it’s your message that needs tweaking. Fortunately, making changes to your message is easy and very cost-effective. For instance: you may already have a website. Simply changing the headline on the home page can make a big difference.

Improving your credibility is a little more elusive. Genuine credibility is earned over time through word-of-mouth, actual customer experience and subjective judgment. However, good writing and design in your marketing materials can do wonders for establishing and maintaining credibility. It reiterates that you are a quality company through the subtle statement of the quality of your communications.

Lastly, visibility is how many people will see your message. Fact is you could have a great message and credibility, but if few people see you or know you, what good is it?

It’s highly important to have all three variables working positively for you at the same time. If you’re doing well on two and badly on one, your marketing efforts are spinning their wheels.

To determine if your marketing is currently running well, take this test:

Marketing message: Do people understand it right away? Does it evoke a “that’s for me” response? Can your clients and others explain your marketing message? Is your message on every single piece of marketing from website to business card? Score (1-10) _____

Credibility: Is your work consistently satisfying to your clients? Do you get word-of-mouth business? Is your website chocked full of useful information on you and your services? Is your brand image and marketing literature professional looking? Total Score (1-10) _____

Visibility: Are you an active networker? Do you have regular meetings with your main contacts? Do you speak at professional associations and conferences? Do write articles to be published online and off regularly? Do you have a regular newsletter or email newsletter? Total Score (1-10) _____

Now multiply your answers. That’s your marketing success score.

Your marketing success score is an easy gauge to determine where you are.

Scott White is President of Brand Identity Guru a leading Corporate Branding and Branding Research firm in Boston, MA.

Brand Identity Guru specializes in creating corporate and product brands that increase sales, market share, customer loyalty, and brand valuation.

This Article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and this resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

Over the course of his 15-year branding career, Scott White has worked in a wide variety of industries: high-tech, manufacturing, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, banking, restaurants, fashion, healthcare, Internet, retail, and service businesses, as well as numerous non-profit organizations.

Brand Identity Guru clients include: Sun Life Financial, Coca Cola, HP, Sun, Nordstrom, American Federal Mortgage, Franklin Sports and many others, including numerous emerging growth companies.

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1. Determine the goals of your promotional products program. Do you want to create awareness? To attract new customers? To reward or provide incentives to existing customers? Remember to determine a means for measuring the results.

2. Plan ahead. At minimum, you’ll need two to four weeks for
production and delivery of standard products. If you wait until the last minute, your choices will be limited and you may pay more. When creating custom items, it can take 12 weeks or more shipping from overseas sources.

3. Involve your target audience. Be creative in how you distribute your promotional products and make it a memorable experience for the recipient. Also create an “out of box” experience whenever possible by creatively packaging your gifts and awards.

4. Choose promotional products that have “legs.” Put your logo on
products that your target customer will see often. For instance,
products that are kept on the desk, in the car, or on the refrigerator can create dozens of impressions per day.

5. Get free ideas. Don’t always ask your promotional products
specialist for the standards such as mugs and pens. Instead, tell your promotional products specialist your budget and target audience, and let them make creative recommendations from their database of over half a million products.

Dan Safkow is a 20-year veteran of promotional marketing and the owner of Promo Ideation http://www.promoideation.com, a promotion products distributorship and marketing consultancy.

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If you want to drive your organization to a higher level of success, here’s a word of advice: set some ambitious goals. No one ever unlocked the leadership capabilities, creativity and passion of their employees by asking for modest gains. Unfortunately in our “prove-it-before-you-do-it” ROI world, some organizations limit risk-taking and inadvertently penalize those who consistently think outside the box. The result is an organization as demoralized as it is bored.

In advertising, this propensity can be deadly. The best advertising people thrive on risk-taking because that’s where the big breakthroughs live. And breakthrough advertising helps build brands and profits. When the pressure to limit risk and drive down costs is overwhelming, it shows in safe, lackluster work.

Lou Tice, personal coach extraordinaire, reminded Seattle’s downtown Rotary last month that setting unrealistic, audacious goals actually increases the likelihood that the goal will be achieved. This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s actually good common sense. Those who set small goals never stretch and grow. So sacred cows thrive, people stay in their comfort zones, the quality of their work suffers, and they influence others to underachieve. Conversely, when people set outlandish goals, the only way they can achieve them is by changing the way things are done, moving into a new zone where innovation can flourish, and turning sacred cows into hamburger.

One of the most dramatic examples of the benefits of setting big goals can be found right here in Seattle. Several years ago, City Librarian Deborah Jacobs and Executive Director of the Seattle Public Library Foundation Terry Collings decided to dream big. In what became the “Libraries for All” initiative, her team set about rebuilding the entire public library system here in Seattle. Not content with providing a much-needed facelift to the facilities, they wanted to show the world that Seattle was serious about opening our doors to anyone who was hungry for information. Reaching this goal required better facilities, more resources for books and programs, and innovative thinking about the role of the library in the digital age.

An amazing thing happened. Their goal was so breathtaking, and the leadership so resolute about achieving it, that momentum started to build. In 1998 Seattle voters approved a $196.4 million bond measure, the largest library bond measure in American history. This funded construction of the new library buildings. Private support flowed into the foundation as momentum built and this provided much needed support to buy books and expand programs. As an icon of this bold, new initiative, the foundation hired the controversial Dutch architect, Rem Kulhaus, to design what has since become the new Central Library, a building universally lauded for both its architectural merit and for bringing the library into the 21st century.

When the Central Library opened, The New York Times architectural critic wrote: “At a dark hour, Seattle’s new Central Library is a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon. If an American city can erect a civic project as brave as this one, the sun hasn’t set on the West. In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review. I could go on piling up superlatives like cars in a multiple collision, but take my word: there’s going to be a whole lot of rubbernecking going on.”

Today, every single community library in the Seattle system is being renovated or rebuilt.
And I’m sure it’s no coincidence that in 2005 we were named the “most literate city in America” by an annual Central Connecticut State University study.

Most people involved in this monumental accomplishment consider it a career-crowning achievement. It started as a goal that seemed too big to achieve, but teamwork, tenacity and out-of-the-box thinking brought this bold idea to its unabashed triumph.

With its unrelenting focus on ROI, corporate America may be crushing the kind of innovation that built our new Central Library. And what is particularly ironic is that bold action often provides a better ROI in the long term than a so-called safer approach. That’s why it’s incumbent upon those of us in advertising and marketing to make the case for risk-taking. We need to push back on the money people and request budgets that allow for innovation, and even the occasional failure. The more conservative, risk-averse philosophy may look sensible, but an approach that guarantees conventional thinking, bland solutions, and modest returns is far from it.

Bill Fritsch is president of Hydrogen Advertising, an award-winning, Seattle-based advertising agency emphasizing superb ideas efficiently produced. Reach him at 206-389-9500, ext. 224 or email bill@hydrogenadvertising.com. For more information, visit http://www.hydrogenadvertising.com.

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