Take a car dealer. Mostly it’s advertising to selling. Now, if you get into small markets, small- town car dealers, you will see a lot of grassroots marketing. You’ll see almost everything that’s in the “NO B.S.” book about grass- roots marketing being done by the small-town car dealer. So, they are exhibiting at the horse show. They have a booth at Friday night high school football games. They are supporting charities. They’re involved in every run for cancer or run for this, run for that. Their sales guys go to career day at the school, etc. They’re also advertising, but what they still don’t understand is how to connect advertising into market- ing and then into selling. Marketing’s biggest job is to help the selling. They get the pro- spective buyer oriented to hear the sales message, have the sales experience, and preferentially buy from this source. If what hap- pens at the sales event is okay, this reduces the need to have superstar sales people (which are actually pretty important).
And it provides price elasticity, competitive advantage, and all sorts of things. And, of course, selling is selling. The sales end of this is where either the first trans- action or advertising and market- ing some real-low threshold, real low-price transaction took place. Then, this is where the second transaction takes place. The famous scene in “Dead- wood” that I sometimes talk about is where a guy brought craps to a bar, and the other bar owner (who doesn’t have it) asks how it’s going. The response is, “I think I made a horrible mistake because everybody coming into here in Deadwood is too dumb to learn how to play craps.” You can’t actually be appealing to people with a complex sales argu- ment if they can’t handle a com- plex sales argument. So, there are all sorts of ways your advertising can be bringing the wrong peo- ple forward. And then, everything else you do is set up to fail. That’s not the only way you can fail with advertising, but it is a significant source of failure with advertising.
Don’t miss the FINAL Magnetic Marketing live event of 2021 on Oct. 13 in Nashville! Reserve your ticket to our Red, White, Blue, and BBQ event in Nashville, where Dan Kennedy will launch his newest book, “Why Advertising Fails!” Get your tickets today at WhyAdvertisingFails.com/keap We only have about 150 seats available in the room, and more than 50% were sold at our most recent event. Get your ticket before we’re sold out.
Keap.com / The Keap Insider / 15
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online