You’re just trying to sell me advertising?

by Darren Matassa, General Sales Manager
Starboard Communications LTD.

“You’re just trying to sell me advertising?”

Over many, many years in the sales and marketing business; I had learnt to hate this quip offered so freely by many a business owner. Over time, I started to change my mind about my distaste for what I always assumed to be a demeaning term, statement or outright attack on my professional ego.

Thankfully, I always had a better way to re-focus this statement and establish a better starting point. After all, I was (and still am) always trying to help the business owner sell more, become more important than their competitors, become a respected brand, create a brand–fans for them, increase profits and the list of reasons to market a business, product, service or event could go on and on.

By definition: “Advertising is the public promotion of something such as a product, service, business, or event in order to attract or increase interest in it.” So in a way, for as many times as I’ve heard the assessment of what Sales and Marketing people do for a living (and taken it the wrong way); the business owners weren’t that wrong in their assessment of what my plan was. The truth rests more in the fact that I needed to sell a business owner on the concept of Advertising; the context in which it was being used and interpreted; were both right and wrong at the same time.

The first step with business owners was and still is, to establish what their interpretation of advertising is. I haven’t met a single business owner (ever) that doesn’t want to increase the strength of their brand, increase sales, revenues, profits, market share, and category position and so on. The stumbling block that stops them at least starting the search for answers on how to gain ground and revenues, is their perception or fear of this concept called “Advertising.”

By definition and theoretically speaking, most business owners understand the “spirit,” of the word; but what they are lacking is a more relevant way of applying this “spirit,” in positive ways that will affect a measurable and positive change in what each business uses for a metric of success.

I’ve been in this business a long time and I’m still learning on a daily basis, how I can be more effective for the business owners that ask for my advice. These days, I’ve had to become very knowledgeable about the marketing industries’ use of new technology and collaborative use of integrated marketing platforms and tools. All these ideas and concepts about how to tie together the collective consumer- minds of website junkies, handheld device addicts, radio listeners, Google surfers, Facebookers, Pinterest-ers, LinkedIn-ers, Television watchers, Netflix is mindful for even a sales and marketing mind like mine. Truth is, the more you search, listen and learn about and discover the best way to think about how to use all these media platforms; you begin to realize that the consumers are already telling and showing us where they are and why. A simplified way to look at how to start planning the use of all, or some mass –media; is a holistic one. Having your business better establish relevance with the people in a natural way that doesn’t create borders between how you advertise to this massive group of consumers.

A holistic approach to your, “advertising,” [marketing] should be characterized by viewing your entire system of advertising/marketing, as a whole; made up by a collection of mass marketing tools that cannot be separated…. (Radio, Print, online, digital, TV, Facebook, LinkedIn just to name a few.) The separation or deletion of some or all of these tools will cause an eventual collapse of your System of Advertising.

A holistic marketing approach looks at your whole business (people, processes and products) and tailors a solution to align systems, services and customer touchpoints so that consumers’ experience of your brand is seamless and consistent across all channels.