I’m sure some of you will agree with me, there is just not enough hours in a day and days in a week…at least when you just move to a new home, in a new city AND in a completely different climate.  The good thing is that after only 3 weeks, we are finally getting pretty much done with most everything.  I even had time to go for an 1hr swim early Sunday morning in the ocean and it was fantastic!

Ok, enough bragging about my new life!  Some of you asked me to give more information on my last post about Mass Media.  Today I would like to say a few words about the biggest concern I get with my new members when we start talking about doing ads in the actual world.  For some reason I don’t get much resistance from them to advertise in the online world…but it’s a different story when we talk about the ‘real world’…

Oh, and by the way, when I say ‘ads’, I mean ads in a very general term and you need to include in this- your postcards, direct-sales letter, radio ads, your marketing brochure, etc.  ok, that said, here are the biggest concern that I see most of the time with a new member of one of my program;

1.    I’m Concerned that my marketing will look “Too Different”.  Oh really, then please prepare to not be noticed, remembered, or get any real result. Your marketing’s first job is to get noticed and you can only get noticed by standing out. You stand out by differentiating yourself in frequency, message, or positioning. Notice that I didn’t say to make your ads weird. No, I said different. And by the way, don’t look at what your competition is doing, or I should probably say in this case, not doing since they probably don’t know what they’re doing.

Like I said, this is the same for your brochure, your website and the way you present yourself when dealing with new prospects.  If you’re only doing what your competition’s doing, you’re immediately replaceable, and you’re not going to be missed. This might hurt your feelings, but we are talking about business here… What you need to do is to pay attention to successful ads and marketing strategies even if they come from other industries.  Between you and me, try to look at small independent company as oppose to what Apple or Big Companies are doing since you probably don’t have the same budget that they have. 

2.    I’m afraid I Won’t Get Enough Leads – Well, you’ll never know if you don’t try. I know; that’s pretty straight forward for an answer but really- start small and then you can go for bigger once you get the results you want. I sometime see web postings like, “Who has tried newspaper ads? Did it work?” Or even worse, you can see responses from other architects who say, “I tried it and it didn’t work” not good to listen to people that don’t know what they are doing and why it didn’t work.

3.    I’m scared to lay out a plan since I might need to change it – Well, it’s not that it might change, it will change.  So the best way to deal with this is to have a plan of what you will do for the coming year and adjust along the way. The time that you will spend planning your ads (your mass media plan) and when you’ll be running your ads will save you a lot of time later, reduces your stress, and makes you “think” through your year instead of reacting to it, and that’s regardless of the economy. There is really no way around this, unless you want to keep fighting with your peers.

Then, the challenge you face is learning what advertising actually works versus just giving money to some other businesses, like newspapers and magazines. I’m not sure if all of you are fully aware of this, but they don’t make their money by selling the newspaper but really by selling spaces for ads in the newspaper.  Same goes for the magazines.  The main danger is that your money can be wasted on non-productive ads leaving your practice financially worse off than before any advertising was started. That’s why it’s so important to build a marketing system that’s based on the principle of “Test and Measure.”

And we are going to look at this in more details on my next post!