Divide Up Your Marketing Messages

2008-10-31 Word Count: 493 Category: Advertising

What I’m about to say will appear to be a bit of a contradiction, so bear with me.

The best marketing campaigns are the kind that take a single message and spread it out over multiple advertising pushes over a period of time. Think about having a single strong marketing push for each quarter, and with it you’ll have a single central message that you’re pushing with every kind of advertising you send out.

The benefits of this come from the stronger saturation of your message. More people are naturally going to hear it because you’ll be pushing it far more than you would if you only did a single advertising push with it.

Now, as for the contradiction, the problem many companies will run into with this is you often can’t have the exact same message with different forms of advertising.

To elaborate, some messages are naturally going to be much shorter, and therefore require a much shorter format in order to effectively use it. Let’s say your main purpose was to promote on ongoing sale. Now, this isn’t that long of a message, which means short formats like postcards or posters will do best.

But what if you want to get some brochure printing done as well? What I’ve often seen is companies taking those shorter messages and trying to drag them out over a brochure even though the message is certainly too short to work. What you get is a brochure that appears too thin and out of place.

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is by making sure ahead of time you know the length of your message and that you only pick forms of advertising that will work well for the length. This can work quite well, but you’d obviously be cutting yourself off from many types of advertising, and personally, I always prefer to keep my options a little more open than that.

This means the second option is what I prefer, which is to form two variations on your message. The first is meant for short formats, while the second one is a longer version of the same thing with additional points added to it.

Using the previous example of the sale, the short message might just be that you’re having a sale, or picking one item from the sale to mention, where as the longer one would show multiple sides of the sale and explain exactly what the savings are. This way you can still use brochure printing even if you have a short message.

I gave my preference, but don’t feel forced, because each company will benefit from different styles of marketing. You’re in the best position to know what will work for your company. Just be aware of the length of your marketing message versus the length of the advertisement you’re trying to fit it into.