Are you Advertising with Certainty or by Chance?
This shift in mindset helps marketers reduce advertising waste by increasing their odds, advertising with certainty, not chance.
How do you decide where to advertise? It’s the burning question every marketer faces when confronted with running their business to win. Digital, print, seo, facebook, instagram, tiktok, twitter, print, postcards, text messaging, billboards, TV, youtube…. There are so many options.
It’s likely your business doesn’t need all of them, but which do you?
John Wanamaker, famous for his department stores and a pioneer in marketing, famously proclaimed:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
While his first department store opened in 1861, it wasn’t until 1874 when Wanamaker placed the first half-page newspaper ad. He was the first retailer to try it. By 1879 he was placing full-page ads (also a first) and his revenue doubled from $4 million to $8 million a year during this short period of time.
Seems he figured out which half of his advertising dollars were being wasted, and then doubled down on the solution.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
It’s not surprising that business owners in the 21st century still share the same sentiment. Advertising options, and their competition for the consumers attention, have made marketing much more complicated.
In this age of information, not knowing is not an option.
You’re not a fortune teller, but when you put money on the line to produce ROI, you’re sort of a gambling man. So, how do you increase your odds of reducing waste? By advertising with certainty, not chance.
Follow along…..
Marketers typically divide upper funnel marketing initiatives between offline and online strategies. We argue a better division to consider should be between chance and certainty style advertising.
Name one thing we all have in common?
Breathing, eating, disabling smoke detectors at 2am…then laying awake the rest of the night wondering when the fire is going to start. We are all pretty much the same, except that…
Not everyone pays for the same streaming services, satellite, or cable. Not everyone drives down the same road, not everyone listens to the same radio station, and not everyone is served up the same FB/Instagram algorithm.
So if not everyone has the same consumption and travel habits, then chance is largely at play when it comes to most all forms of advertising.
Chance style advertising is largely based on audience demographics and leaves awareness gaps — the people that don’t know about your business — in marketing, costing the advertiser more cost per impression (CPI), and ultimately a higher cost per conversion (CPC). While Facebook and Instagram advertising is popular, the certainty of reach is completely unknown, as no two people are served the same ad at the same frequency.
Even billboards, while excellent tools, only make an impression on the people who drive down that particular road.
Radio stations are limited to the relative audience that opts to tune in.
“Chance style advertising is largely based on audience demographics and leaves awareness gaps — the people that don’t know about your business — in marketing, costing the advertiser more cost per impression (CPI), and ultimately a higher cost per conversion (CPC). ”
When we’re talking about putting money on the line in the hopes of getting a return on investment, shouldn’t certainty be the goal?
There is one thing everyone does. We all go home. We live there, raise families there, retire there, even work there. Many people love their home so much, they hardly ever go outside, except to get their mail.
The mailbox is the only method that allows you to reach everyone in a community.
Direct mail is the only type of advertising that delivers certainty. Certainty of reach and coverage.
Want to make sure every resident knows about your business?
Want to target every home in your market with a household income of $250,000, republican voters who are married. You can buy a mailing list for that.
There is certainty in direct mail delivery that is unmatched by any other form of marketing.
“Certainty style advertising is the ultimate upper funnel advertising method that covers the broadest swath of coverage, and most precise targeting leaving no awareness gap for the advertiser. ”
Skeptics might say that a postcard or magazine may get lost in the mail or tossed. And it’s likely that does happen. Even still the probability of gaps is so much lower than the “chance” forms of advertising.
Certainty style advertising is the ultimate upper funnel advertising method that covers the broadest swath of coverage, and most precise targeting leaving no awareness gap for the advertiser.
When you approach advertising from a top-down strategy, reaching the most amount of people first, you increase your odds to win.
One style of advertising does not replace the other, but brands who give priority in their advertising budget to the certainty style advertising of direct mail have smaller awareness gaps to battle and a more opportunity to win.
The budget remaining can then be allocated to chance style advertising that micro-targets audiences by their demographics like a billboard located in a specific location, Christian radio station, or remarketing on social media channels.
Interestingly John Wanamaker, the man who pioneered print marketing, later went on to serve as U.S. Postmaster General during the term of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison from 1889 to 1893. Print, plus direct mail for the win.