Set yourself down a minute. Coffee's on, and before you say anything about advertising, I want to ask you a question about your own town. Who's the best-known business on your street — not the biggest, the best-known? The one folks mention at the hardware store without being asked. Now here's the follow-up, and think on it before you answer: when's the last time you saw an advertisement for them?
If you're like most folks, you're coming up empty, and there's a lesson standing right there in the empty. The best-known business in a small town usually got that way without buying a single shout. They got that way because their regulars carry them. Every satisfied customer who tells a neighbor "you ought to go see them" is a broadcast that no station sells, and it's worth more than anything with a rate card, because it arrives pre-believed. The neighbor isn't hearing a claim. He's hearing a report from somebody whose judgment he's already tested at his own kitchen table.
Around this house, we call that the megaphone you don't rent. And the whole art of local marketing is just this: giving your regulars something true and tellable to carry.
What a regular can carry
A regular can't carry your price list. Nobody repeats a price list at a barbecue unless they're complaining about it. A regular can't carry your slogan either — slogans are for the business, not the telling. What a regular can carry is a story with a person in it. The time you came out after hours because their water heater quit on a Sunday. The time you talked them out of the expensive fix because the cheap one was the honest one. The way you remember what they ordered, what their kid's name is, what went wrong last time and that you made it right without being asked twice.
Notice what those stories have in common: every one of them is just the work, done right, with a witness. That's the part of marketing nobody can sell you, and it's also the part that matters most. You don't manufacture the story. You behave it, one customer at a time, and then you make sure it's easy to retell — which mostly means keeping it true and keeping it simple enough to survive the trip across a fence line.
The two mistakes that cost you the megaphone
Shouting over your own regulars. A business that spends its breath claiming to be wonderful teaches its regulars to stop saying it — why would they repeat what you're already hollering? Worse, your claims and their reports get weighed against each other, and claims always lose. Let the megaphone do the talking. Your job is to keep handing it true things to say.
Being a different business in the telling than in the doing. If the advertisement promises warmth and the counter delivers a shrug, the story that travels is the shrug — and it travels faster, because disappointment is the most portable story there is. The fix isn't better words. The fix is the work, then the words, in that order, every time.
What this house is
Good Ol' Dad is the marketing department of this establishment — the porch where the family's work gets its stories told, plain and warm and straight. It's a young department, still in development, and it says so right on the door, because a house that sells honesty ought to start with its own. The counsel it gives is the counsel in this article, and it costs the same as it ever did: do work worth repeating, tell the truth about it simply, and let the people who've seen it carry it farther than money can.
Come sit with us while we build it: goodoldad.marketing. The coffee's terrible. The stories are honest. Around here, that's the right way around.
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All articles: myaiassistanceoffice.com/articles.html