How to Advertise Like a Big Brand, When You’re ‘Boutique’

Household names like Kleenex and Band-Aid not only have sticking power, but likely also share a presence in your own home. They have been around everywhere, long enough to firmly adhere their brand names to consumers’ minds, that nobody asks for a tissue or a plastic bandage anymore. But, when you are just getting started in the big, wide world of advertising, or you know your ad budget will never measure up, it is hard to imagine you could ever build the type of trust and sales that these media giants have achieved over decades.

So, how do you stand out if you are a smaller company with a smaller ad budget? Here are some tips:

Follow Cues from Market Leaders
Every community has their own local “big brands.” We’re not talking about Tide and Target, we mean the local personal injury attorney, or leading real estate brokerage, and car dealerships. These businesses have become household names in your community because they advertise everywhere and consistently focus on upper funnel advertising that always drives new and returning business. They never wait for sales to slump, they prevent the slump by always having their advertising in the ‘on’ position.

Your boutique size business can benefit from their lead by paying attention to where and how often these brand advertise. They have done the vetting for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel, do what they do, go where they go, just scale your ad sizes to match the size of your business and sales goals.

Maintain a Consistent Presence
Just like a good neighbor, familiarity brings with it a sense of trust. Consistently building your brand strengthens its connection to the minds and memories of your target audience. In Jacksonville, when you think about organizing your house, you think about Closets by Design and that is by design. Their ever present advertising strategy positions their brand to always be in view. Whether a consumer turns on the TV, opens the mailbox, or logs onto social media they see Closets by Design.

The same can be said for other local “big brands’ like Morgan and Morgan, Shark Coatings, Farah and Farah and Bozard Ford Lincoln.

DJ and Lindsey Real Estate used advertising to completely change the game for their brokerage. Traditionally each individual realtor is responsible for their own advertising and lead generation, but they took an entirely different approach. Instead, DJ and Lindsey saw an opportunity innovate and they assumed the advertising expense and responsibility from the brokerage level to focus on being a lead machine for their realtors, sometimes buying every billboard in town. This marketing strategy has built them a team of over 60 realtors, who can focus on customer service for homeowners and buyers, leave the marketing to a well trained department, and keeping their brokerage at the top of the charts for real estate transactions.

Bottom line: It’s this consistent follow through of ever-present advertising these brands use that takes consumers from the awareness stage to the converting stage more frequently.

Tackle Your Marketing from the Top Down
Every dollar counts in your marketing spend, so spend wisely. You need to get the biggest bang for your buck first, so chose the biggest coverage first. Allocating the biggest part of your budget to advertising methods that reach the largest audience first and dialing it down from there. Why is this important? Because this method allows you to fill your advertising funnel from the top, establishing your brand and that’s where the relationship with the consumer begins. It’s called awareness.

But it’s not just about brand awareness, it’s about brand awareness at the best cost. The bigger the coverage, the lower your CPI will be to reach new consumers. Cost per impression (CPI) is the cost that one will pay when their ad is shown to each impression. Another form of measurement is CPM (cost per thousand impressions) which is the measured of cost that one will pay when their ad is shown per one thousand impressions.

For example: In print, an impression is an individual magazine delivered. Let’s say you have $1,200 to spend. If you spent it on a magazine that is delivered to 50,000 homes, your CPI would be .024 cents to reach each individual house. But if you spend that $1,200 on a magazine to reach 16,000 houses, your cost per impression would be much greater at .075 cents. Nearly 3 times the price.

These are the type of calculations big brands, with marketing departments, use to decipher where to advertise and it’s not proprietary, you can use this math too.

Lower performing medias come with lower rates and often this can be appealing to an advertiser with a small budget. Just be warned, basing your advertising decisions off the rates without evaluating the CPI will yield poor ROI to see any residual impact.

Make an Annual Plan
Large companies think about their marketing for the year… not based on how much money is in the bank account now. Buying one-off ads here and there, or making knee jerk reactions based on how you vibe with the sales rep create dips in your sales cycles.

Let your sales goals for the year be what drives you to make a marketing plan for the year. Do you want to increase your revenue or do the same? Have you brought on new staff, a new service or new technology as a new channel of revenue? Once you have a big picture view of how you want your business to perform this year, making a marketing plan, that follows a traditional sales funnel (like the one below from Skyword) taking a new leads through the nurturing process and ultimately the sale.

Your advertising fills the funnel so you can follow through with engagement on social media, email blasts, news letters, demos and the sale.

Brand Yourself

Consistent, professional graphics are essential to establish brand rapport. Color, graphics, fonts, pictures all play to the senses. When you’re watching what “big brands” do, pay attention to how precise they are when it comes to brand graphics. They never waver from their brand identity and neither should you.

Your brand is more than a logo, it’s an essence of what you do and this is communicated through imagery, advertising copy and calls to action as well.

When you are working on that marketing plan, think about the problem your services solve for your consumer and let that be the guide to coming up with the most authentic brand messaging you use across your upper and middle funnel marketing.

Also, buy the book Building a Storybrand. We highly recommend it.

Becoming a household name in your community is easier than you imagine, as long as you’re willing to go on the journey of looking at your advertising from a big brand, big picture perspective and not one ad at a time. If you’re ready to get started, we’re happy to help.