Jun26
Is Your Glass Not Full At All?
You’re sitting at a table and there are ten tall glasses in front of you. Each glass is roughly the same size and each glass is empty. You have in your hand one quart of water. Not a gallon, a quart, and you need to pour it into the glasses. What do you do?
There are two ways to answer this question.
The first is pouring a little bit of water into each glass, roughly dividing your limited resource equally. While this is fair to each glass, no one who picks up a glass will have their thirst quenched by the few drabs of liquid inside.
The other approach is to pick one or two of the glasses and fill them completely, using your limited resource to fully satisfy the thirst of a few.
Unfortunately, most small businesses use the first approach with their marketing. They take their (very) limited financial resources and divide them equally between the dozen or so advertising options available to them. In trying to be fair to every medium, they are doing an incredible disservice to themselves. No one learns enough about their business to make an informed decision regarding it.
A better approach is selecting one or two advertising mediums that are a perfect fit with your core customer and pour everything into those glasses. That way you provide enough information to satisfy the curiosity of potential customers.
This may look like having multiple ads in the same print publication, multiple billboards on the same thoroughfare, owning a day on a radio station or a show on cable TV.
Completely filling one or two water glasses is a concept called media domination, and it’s critical to marketing success. Media domination means selecting the few advertising channels that are the best fit for your core customer and using those channels in an overwhelming way. Only then will your voice be heard (Or your water drunk).
