Marketing is Milk for Business
All businesses are in the marketing business.
The truth of the matter is that anybody that owns and runs a business has to be involved in marketing. It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is when your customers are ignorant to it’s existence. The tricky part is that good marketing isn’t just a department of your company, needs to be integrated in all aspects of customer relations. Apple is killer at this, intentionally designing absolutely every last customer interaction, from the packaging to the website to the store to the product to the power cords.
Vertical integration of marketing throughout the entire company is often over-looked, and often sorely needed.
Lots and lots of talk.
The basic goal of all marketing is pretty much the same: we are here, we are worth your money. Sharing this message requires communication, and things start to get complicated when you explore all of the different mediums and strategies for sharing a message. To stir up the pot even more, every medium has lots and lots of messages on it, and people don’t have enough time or attention to spend on all of them. Oh my, now things start to get competitive. It’s this competitive nature of the communications marketplace demands creativity to communicate your message in the most efficient and effective manner possible.
Pictures worth a thousand words.
When I was in journalism school (writing, not shooting) one of the first lessons learned was the power of the photograph to motivate an audience into paying attention to the accompanying story. While the mediums used for communicating have changed, photographs are still useful at getting people to stop skimming and start paying attention. This was true 60 years ago, and it’s true today. If it wasn’t, then the photographs of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s latest progeny wouldn’t sell for $14 million. Pictures mean audience, and communication demands audience.
The good news for myself and all of my photographer colleagues is that image making is not going anywhere. Point of fact, there are more photographs made and viewed now then in any other time in history. I’ll use the 10 billion photographs hosted by Facebook as my argument. This ups the ante on how and what kind of images are paid for. People see so many photographs on the internet, on billboards, and just about everywhere else, to the point of saturation. The bad news is that this abundance of images has pushed many photographers out of the business. The good news is that pictures are still worth a thousand words, and now, more then ever, certain businesses are going to need those words to not just be in focus and well exposed, but of good concept, production and execution.
Videos are a thousand words.
As the mediums used to communicated become richer, we can start to communicate more and more with moving pictures and sound, making for a rich experience sharing lots and lots of messages. Video is also here to stay, but it’s not the answer-all-questions panacea that it’s made out to be. Video still requires a fair bit of bandwidth, and a fair bit of expertise to do well. It doesn’t require all of the expensive equipment that it once did, but good production still costs lot of time and money, or both. Consuming video also takes time, more time then consuming images. This, along with other considerations must be thought about before beginning a video project. Youtube loves videos, but as an audience it helps if your video is short. Brevity is the game we play here.
With DSLR’s entering the marketplace in force, we’re seeing more and more video of increasing quality and content. I imagine that we’re going to see the same trends in video as we have with photographs: a supersaturated bottom and middle, and an expensive, highly produced top for clients who really need a high quality creative product.
Communications is costing me too much.
Production quality is expensive, for video or stills. Even when we do our own in-house productions, it costs money. Many of my business owner friends spend little to no money on marketing a message because the numbers are intimidating and large. Intimidating and large encourages an anecdote, so I’ll give one about our logo. It’s two brackets and a lower-case o, simple font play, created and designed by the marketing firm Agent-X. Logo design was many thousands of dollars, money that could have been spent on equipment, personal work, payroll, any number of things. But the logo works brilliantly, the branding is top quality and worth every penny. We have made back the cost of the branding development many times over, even though it was a terrifyingly expensive purchase at the time.
Good communication requires creative, professional people, and we cost money. The good news is that if you integrate marketing and the customer communication implied into every level of your business, then the sun will beam down on your business, your products and services will sell faster then anticipated, and business does well. Maybe not quite, but it’s surprising what some simple communication can do to transform your business. [o]