Real Advertising for Real Problems

By Jason McAndrew

Every once in a while one of these guys (market researcher) will roll into town coming from somewhere over 50 mile away with an over simplified answer to advertising. And just because they’re from a city larger than yours, they consider themselves to be an expert. They set advertising back and tend to confuse clients, because, they present a basic cookie cutter approach that may work somewhere, supposedly with someone and in some obscure market. Yes, they may have the answer but it may not be to your question. And you can bet they didn’t have the wherewithal to put the campaign together themselves. And one final point is they haven’t spent their own money to run an ad campaign.

This presentation from Hanson Marketing and Advertising will be a little different, in fact 180 degrees different, in that we’ll give you 4 case studies of local and regional businesses that you can relate to and use for your business. This is real advertising for real problems with real solutions.

We are not here to promote one media or concept or one cookie cutter approach to advertising. Because, if someone tells you there is just one way to advertise your business, we guarantee you that 18 months from now it can all change.

Understand, marketing is a fluid process, and that’s why we treat advertising as part science and part art. I mean you can make the best media buy in the world, but if the creative is weak you won’t get the markets attention. On the other hand if the creative is strong and you have the wrong media and the wrong targets you still won’t win.

The right combination of media buying to the right target market with the right message will put money in your pocket. The phone will ting and customers will walk in the door. Just do your homework. And at Hanson Marketing if we can get you to believe just one concept today, a concept that holds true year after year in a competitive market, it is that name awareness is absolutely critical to your success. So, if you learn nothing else, there is a direct correlation between name awareness, gross market share, and gross profits.

Here’s an example of a husband and wife family operation with one high-end home appliance store store. And they wake up every morning and do battle with the giants. It’s the classic David and Goliath battle, with John and Roxanne Shouse versus Circuit City, Best Buy, and Sears. And John and Roxanne’s weapon is effective advertising. They used billboards and television to create strong name recognition and have increase sales through extensive merchandising in conjunction with name awareness.

How important is name awareness? It is our opinion that you have to make someone think of you when it’s time to make a purchase. And the average person can think of no more than 7 companies in your category, and often it’s only 2 or 3. Name awareness is the starting point and will dictate what you sell as long as you service what you sell.

Now how do you succeed in this market? First, let’s start with a simple explanation of the basic two categories of marketing, branding and merchandising. Branding includes creating name awareness and perception of value, while the purpose of merchandising is to create a trial of your product, increase the number of visits and up the ticket. But branding must be established before merchandising can happen, otherwise you will not be profitable. You can’t start an ad campaign by discounting, and expect to make money.

A true blue branding case is that of the Gold Rush Hotel & Casino. The Gold Rush was in bankruptcy when it began its relationship with Hanson Marketing. Over the next two years we helped to bring them out of bankruptcy and into position as one of the most successful casinos in Cripple Creek. Over the last 12 months Cripple Creek showed an increase of 3% and the Gold Rush Casino generated 36% of that increase. We recently conducted a random name recognition survey of the casinos in Cripple Creek and the Gold Rush received a 36% name recognition score, which was very good considering that the average respondent could only recall the names 2.4 casinos.

The Gold Rush allows the perfect look at targeting the right demographics and getting results. Because, rather than taking all adults in the market we took a look at who would and could go to Cripple Creek and gamble. We then separated the groups we felt would be most effective to direct our message towards and addresses them one at a time, not only with media but also with creative. In other words we created commercials that appealed more towards the senior citizen market and ran those commercials on stations and during shows that seniors watch most. And at the same time had completely different commercials running on more trendy stations with the creative directed towards a younger audience.

Yes, the ads for the Gold Rush pushed the creative envelope, but they were also successful because of multiple target markets.

The old rule in advertising was to always pick your one target market and stick with it. However, that is not the case anymore, in fact the more valid targets you have the more opportunity you have. And that is one reason Hanson Marketing is so unique, in that we not only target multiple demographic groups for each of our clients, but we also tailor our creative to the various targets.

How do you isolate your target market and advertise for it?

Penrad Imaging is a great example of ad dollars spent to sales return. They are a specialized radiological center, and often have a very select advertising market for many of their services. In this specific case we look at their Heart Screen campaign and show you in detail a direct correlation of the amount they spent on advertising to the number of heart screens they performed each month. In short they increased sales of heart screens from 13 a month before advertising to 113 a month after the advertising campaign had began. And can see in this graph (show graph of heart screen #s to dollars spent)

We know that you are still probably asking yourself the same question you asked yourself when you first hung your sign and opened the doors to your business…”If I spend my money on advertising what am I going to get out of it?”

Well here is what Six & Geving Commercial Insurance Brokers got out of it. When Hanson Marketing began doing advertising for Six & Geving they only had 6 employees working for them. Now through the use of television and billboards they have increased their name recognition dramatically, increased sales and increases their staff, which now totals 33 employees.