What is the best way to reach your audience and create a relationship with them?

 

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You have complete control over it. That's the good part. Here's the better part: it used to cost a bundle to send out a positive metames. It used to be expensive to produce professional marketing materials. Technology, mainly desktop publishing, has changed that. It also costs little to produce unprofessional marketing materials. In fact, it costs so little that many would-be guerrillas are wooed away from success by the temptation to save a buck on production.

 

Reflecting on my own experience with clients over the years, I realize that 40 percent of them, usually the big ones, spent too much on production. This did wonders for their egos, but not their sales.

 

They confused their prospective customers with too much style and not enough substance. Their electronic marketing radio and TV reeked with so much fluff and unnecessary window dressing that the message became cloudy. Another 40 percent of my clients, usually the smaller ones, spent too little on production. They invested in media advertising but not in artwork and production. They bought a lot of time and space but not a lot of talent. They decided that they could write the copy themselves and that
their friends could do the artwork.

 

 

That's how it usually works out. You can amortize those funds over a long period of time. Let's say you plan to spend $36,000 over one year to market your product. That comes to $3,000 per month. This means that you should spend $3,600 producing ads and marketing materials. If you are a new company, or an old company coming to your senses, you may want to invest in a logotype, or logo. This is your symbol—a visual representation of your company such as McDonald's golden arches or Shell's station.

 

It should include your name, though Shell's doesn't and really doesn't have to after nearly a century of exposure. Nike's "swoosh" logo doesn't need the Nike name for identification, and Nike didn't need a lot of time to implant its logo in our collective consciousness because their financial investment was great. Your logo will appear on your signs, in your ads, on your business cards, stationery, and brochures, and on all of your materials. It will become associated with you. To produce a logo, a good art director will charge anywhere from $250 to $50,000.

 

You'd be overspending if you went the $50,000 route—though large corporations have spent more than double that—and you'd be underspending if you paid an art student $50—unless he or she was a highly talented student destined for marketing greatness. They do exist, and art schools are where you find them. Because you'll be using it for a long period of time and in many different applications, invest in a first-class logo. If this means you write a check for $500 to $1,500 up front, you can amortize that expenditure over the length of time you are in business.

 

In the long run, it may come to only a few dollars per month. Truth is, you should not even consider the money you spend for a logo as part of your production budget. It's above and beyond that budget. Say you are quoted a price of $500 to produce an ad. Sounds like a lot. But if you run that ad over the course of four months, it comes to only $125 per month which is a small sum for production. And $500 should buy you a darned good looking ad. Naturally, you won't want to spend a lot money on an ad you'll run only once, but remember, guerrillas do run their ads more than once.

 

They run them until the ads stop pulling in business.

 

 

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