When most people think about digital marketing, they think about the latest auto-playing YouTube ads stopping them from watching their next video or the flashy ads running on their favorite websites’ sidebar. Most don’t see the other side of media creation, and that’s by design. Advertising is one of the most critical tools for uplifting small and upstarting businesses off the ground and into the limelight. Through measured and well-thought-out campaigns, a fledgling start-up can begin to challenge major players in an area and carve out their well-deserved slice of the pie. This post will teach you how effective communication can make or break your business!
Small businesses and the teams that support them are much like a body’s critical organs. Each has a purpose, and the whole would not function without them. When the business is booming, you can feel it, like a beating heart pumping life into each cell of the body. You feel the energy from the staff, the owners, and most importantly, the customers. The difference between an empty restaurant struggling to make ends meet and a booming patio full of happy guests can sometimes come down to communication. When a business struggles to create a dialog between their customer base and themselves, it can confuse and frustrate the customer. Likewise, when that dialog is present and successfully communicates the important information from the business to the consumer, the customer leaves satisfied and will use the information to support their decision to come to and spend money supporting the business again in the future.
When speaking with a restaurant owner our team once worked with, they said something that has stuck with us. Through the many years they had owned the company, one critical thing remained constant: the experience he tried to provide for them. He had watched some marketing teams try their best to reimagine the business and capture an audience that wasn’t there. At the end of the day, while new business is great, it is always a mixed hat trying to capture that new audience without alienating those who have been there, supporting the foundations of what made the restaurant what it was. This perspective on growth is essential, as ambition often blinds those who have it. Our function as the marketing organ inside the body of a small business isn’t to reinvent the wheel but rather to take the information most critical to the customer and the owner and communicate it effectively. In this way, marketing acts as the voice of your business. Like a voice, it speaks for the body and communicates with the world. This voice is the first impression, yet many small businesses overlook it.
Much like marketing is critical to success, clarity is critical to successful communication. The mistake an overly-ambitious ad most often makes is a loss of clarity by trying too hard to become something that isn’t necessary. Minimalism was born out of the need in modern, fast-paced society to convey information to the near subconscious of an overly-apathetic reader. It is critical when your target audience’s gaze moves past your work that it can, without effort, consume the information you intend to convey. This clarity takes many forms, from bright, contrasting colors to bold typefaces and plenty of breathing room for the content you most need to convey. It is critical to have a marketing “mouth” that knows what it’s talking about.
Intrigue is the tool needed to bridge the gap between minimalism and practicality. In practice, an advertisement is meant to convey information to the client. However, if there is too much information, you will scare off potential readers. The solution is to allow natural human curiosity to solve that issue for you. Making an ad with an intentionally unexpected design will often attract the eye of the consumer and give them an opportunity to explore your brand information organically, on their own time. Customers often prefer to go to a restaurant they feel they discovered for themselves rather than one that blasts its ads over the socials and airwaves. There is a certain feeling of comfort in knowing that you are a part of a business’s community rather than just the target of their advertising. This effect isn’t easy to achieve organically, but when done right, it can lead to lifetime supporters of the business, a true keystone to any successful venture.
Without taking this role for our customers, they would be left trying to navigate our world without our experience. Anyone would agree that this could only lead to disaster and miscommunication between the customer and their clientele. Over-communication has never caused a business to fail, but everyday businesses fail due to under-communication. We often feel our client’s relief wash over us as they realize the success they are afforded by working with industry professionals rather than trying to handle the nuance of marketing by themselves. The happiness of the business owner passes down to make happy staff and satisfied customers, and here at The AD Leaf, that’s what it’s all about.
