You know you can’t build a house or anything significant without a plan, yet so many people wind up trying to build their business or at least their advertising without any plan at all. They are starting a business, so they think up a name for their business. Then they need to make a website, so they pick a domain name. They realize they need some advertising so they make up some ads. They realize they need a toll free number so they look for a toll free number. They look for a good one of each of these things separately and just hope that they all fit together properly.
An Advertising Plan = The Message of your Advertising.
Contrast that to someone starting a business that starts with a plan, which in advertising translates to the right message. It’s very tempting to think that the type of business you’re in is your plan, but that’s not a plan. Everyone knows what type of business they’re in, but most people don’t have a plan or know the real message of their advertising. And if you don’t know the message of your advertising, your prospects definitely won’t see or hear it either.
A Plan takes Work
Most people looking for a toll free number don’t have a real slogan. That’s much further down their list of priorities and it’s not easy to come up with a really creative slogan. It’s not easy to find your message, just like it’s not easy to make a real plan for building a house. It seems like it’s easier and faster to just start building. After all, it’s not that hard to put up a wall and you really just had to have a wall to get started.
The downside comes later on when you’re trying to fit all of the pieces together and realize that you really don’t have an effective theme to your advertising. A plan takes work but in the long run saves time and increases the effectiveness of all of your marketing and advertising. And in a competitive field strong effective marketing focused around that theme makes all the difference in the world.
Start with a Slogan
One of the easiest ways to insure that you have a plan is to start with a powerful creative slogan. A slogan is NOT just a description of the type of work you do or the business you’re in. In today’s crowded marketing space consumers have their guard up and are bombarded by so much advertising that they have to block as much of it as possible. That’s why it takes real creativity and an edge to get through the noise today.
I know this is easier to say than it is to do, but if you jump in and do it right it’s really not as hard as you might think it is. Start by coming up with at least a dozen CRAZY slogans. Crazy is the extreme of creative, and it’s easier to tone down a crazy slogan to make it just creative than it is to pump up a boring slogan and make it interesting. Then go through and check the phrases in the slogans for toll free numbers and domain names and you’ll find phrases or terms you wouldn’t have thought of before when you were just trying to think up words and phrases related to your business.
Most importantly, if you find something that works, you’ll have not just a good number, but you’ll have a plan that makes all of the pieces of your advertising not just fit together but work together much more effectively. When get a toll free number that ties into a creative slogan, you have a much more powerful message that will get through to and resonate with the customer. You may not be able to change the name of your organization, but it’s more important for your toll free number to match the message of your advertising than it is your company name.