Is your approach to business marketing creative, practical and authentic? If you can put a tick beside these fundamental marketing communication criteria, it’s very likely you’re winning the client engagement trifecta, and with it a legion of loyal, long-term clients while enjoying regular new business enquiries.
Here we explain our approach to creative and practical business marketing for small and medium sized business owners.Then, in a coming article we’ll address why it’s important to create authentic business marketing communications.
Creative
The most successful brands are memorable because they’re simple, recognisable and their brand message makes sense and resonates with the intended audience.
While it’s exciting to consider wildly creative concepts, if they lack a clear purpose, even the most creative ideas can fail.
If you’ve ever visited a website with stunning graphics and vibrant colours, audio and moving pictures but it’s slow to load, difficult to navigate and hard to find the information you need, you’ll know what we mean.
It’s all about balance. It’s the creative that compels your clients to take a closer look: A clever, off beat or funny headline or an aesthetically pleasing design that grabs your attention and piques interest to learn more or make contact with you.
In our experience applying a less-is-more rule to creativity is very often the master stroke for small and medium sized businesses.
Excessively creative marketing concepts are usually expensive, and they can be time consuming to implement and maintain. This is why we believe ‘creative’ for small and medium sized businesses should be directly tethered to ‘practical’ application.
Keeping concepts clean and removing the clutter so the brand and core messaging can shine through is key.
Practical
Generally speaking, the simpler the concept, the easier it will be to produce and implement. That means it will also cost less, and perhaps most importantly, there’s less chance of confusing your audience, who’ll receive your message loud and clear.
For us, taking a practical approach to marketing is the inspiration behind our creative endeavours and the outcomes our clients need. We believe creative pursuits need to balance with practical implementation because they directly affect time and money.
For example, we know small businesses owners often feel pressured to use professional photography of real clients on their websites and in their marketing materials. These suggestions often come from those who don’t actually walk in the shoes of small business, where both time to coordinate and budget to foot the bill, are limited.
In our experience, carefully chosen ‘believable’ stock images can convey relatable and emotive visuals without the cost and complexity of dealing with real clients and photographers. Stock image libraries are accessible and affordable, and in our view, today’s clients are open minded enough to accept these images as visually appropriate for your marketing materials.
This, of course, is simply one example of a practical marketing application.
We challenge ourselves to make more of what our clients already have, then use it in fresh and impactful ways to deliver creatively practical and authentic marketing resources that help our clients stand out from the crowd and attract the right kind of new business enquiry.
For small and medium sized business owners, compelling creative you can be proud of, and that engages your ideal clients, is as necessary as a marketing communication strategy that addresses the practical requirements of time, affordability and accountability.
If you’d like to know more or if we can help you to prepare and deliver creative, practical and authentic business marketing communication that helps your business to grow and be successful, please call us on 07 5477 0197 or email marketing@boldcorp.com.au we’d love to help.
At Bold! our motto is ‘creative, practical and authentic’ and we specialise in helping professionals and business owners to use marketing to grow and be successful.
Over the past 25 years we have fine-tuned what we call our ‘Do-able Marketing’ model. It is underpinned by a 7-Step Do-It-For-Me (DIFM) Marketing framework that overcomes the THREE key issues that professionals and business owners have told us prevent them from marketing their businesses: Time, Affordability and Accountability.
