Advertising and Marketing Ideas to Create Phenomenal Profits In YOUR Small Business

“How To Kill Your Small Business” PDF Print E-mail
“How To Kill Your Small Business”

One of the most important rules of marketing is to..not be boring.

So doing outrageous things to get attention isn’t a bad idea. But….

A Florida vacuum cleaner dealer went a tad too far.

His business card has a picture of a scantily dressed lady with the caption “Rent me, you’ll be satisfied”. The card is to rent carpet cleaners.

This guy is not a Gold Member, and I only met him once. But he wanted to show me his ads.
All of them had the same theme. Scantily dressed women making suggestive remarks.

He told me that he’s had several guys tell him that they thought it was clever.

I’m sure that’s true. In fact, I thought it was a novel idea.
But…..
Almost no woman would think the ads were clever...and about half the men would be at least slightly turned off. My estimate was that 80% of the people seeing his ads, and his card, would be turned off, and 20% would be ..um...turned on (sorry, I couldn’’t help myself).

This has nothing to do with being a prude. It has a lot to do with not causing large numbers of people to not want to do business with you.

The worst thing, from a marketing perspective, is that the “theme” doesn’t add any desire to buy. It shows no benefit to buy from him.
Of course, maybe once a year he gets a guy who wants to meet the model. But that isn’t business.

Unfortunately,  this guy is completely unaware that he is killing his own business. But because he never tracks his ad results (he told me)...he has no way of knowing this. Sad.

On a related idea….

Targeting your ad for a certain demographic is smart. If you advertise in a “Wedding Supplement” of the local paper, you may want to make the headline “For women only…”

Why? Because men aren’t reading it anyway, and it makes the reader feel that the ad benefits are exclusive to them.