Tailoring Your Message for Each Advertising Medium
Like a pair of shoes, one size does not fit all. This rings especially true for your company’s messaging. Certain things like your brand’s visuals, voice, and language should have a borderline boringly consistent implementation across your different channels. But this sort of rigid consistency doesn’t apply to the type of, or amount of, information being displayed across all of your different advertising mediums.
This is because each tool in your marketing toolkit has its own strengths and weaknesses as a medium. Think of a truck wrap and a brochure. Even if they belong to the same brand, the information that is presented on each of them should be tailored to fit the purpose of each tool. Understanding these differences is key to ensuring your brand’s messaging is optimized for each one, and avoids coming across as tone-deaf to any potential customers.
Brand Awareness vs. Customer Education
Very broadly speaking, your different advertising mediums are going to fall into one of two different categories: brand awareness or customer education. This is determined by how your audience interacts with these different mediums. How long does someone have to interact with the material, and how far along someone is on the buyer’s journey?
Advertising mediums that are used to build brand awareness are frequently going to be one of the first interactions someone has with your brand. For a home service company, that is often going to be a vehicle wrap, or possibly even a site sign.
The job of these materials, as odd as it sounds, isn’t actually to make a conversion when someone sees them. Does it happen? Sure, sometimes, but it will be exceptionally rare that someone needs your service in the moment that they see something like your company vehicles. The goal of these materials is to start getting your brand living rent-free in people’s minds, so that they already have a name to look up on google for when they are ready to contact someone in your industry. This starts with having strong branding of course.
In practical terms, this means less is more when it comes to the information being displayed on these materials. People usually only have a matter of seconds to see something like a truck wrap before it is long gone. You don’t need to list your companies services, pictures of your work, or anything else that is difficult to parse in such a short timespan, and/or anything that distracts from the brand. And to be quite honest, the average person seeing these things is doing so completely unsolicited and just does not care at all about this additional information, at least not yet.
Instead, you should be using this window of a few seconds to get them to remember the brand. Materials that build brand awareness should, at most, be focused on usually only 3 text elements — your logo, your company tagline, and a single call to action, preferably your website.
If we compared this to the dating world, this is simply the point in the process where you are introducing yourself in a friendly manner to hopefully leave a good first impression, not asking them back to your place. The latter would come across incredibly strange if you just met someone, and is no different for potential customers.
Common Materials for Brand Awareness:
Billboards
Site Signs
Vehicle Wraps
Now that someone has hopefully remembered your brand, you need to choose advertising mediums that are best-suited for educating customers about what makes your company different and the right fit for the service they need performed. If we go back to the idea of a brochure, someone might be scratching their head if all it contained was your logo, tagline, and a website link. Again, one size does not fit all. That information format is perfectly-suited for a truck wrap, but comes across as tone-deaf if you were to apply it to something like a trifold brochure.
This is all because of the length of time someone will have to interact with these materials. They might only have a few seconds to see your company vehicles on the road, but if they are sitting down with a brochure or at their computer reading your website, this is where you can finally afford to go more in-depth about your offerings. In fact, if a potential customer has made it this far, they are often asking for or expecting you to do so. Take advantage of that in a clear and concise way, and give them a reason to pick up the phone.
Common Materials for Customer Education:
Brochures
Door Hangers
Mailers
Rack Cards
Trade Show Booths
Websites
I think it is also important to address a common, knee-jerk impulse we do occasionally see from owners, specifically when it comes to materials that are meant to build brand awareness. Sometimes there is an, admittedly understandable, reluctance to show some restraint with the amount of information being displayed.
And I totally get it. It’s not an insignificant amount of money to wrap your fleet or to pay for a billboard every month. And as an owner, especially if you are running a smaller company, there could be a fear that you aren’t getting your money’s worth if you aren’t listing all of your services, pricing, photos, etc.
But I want to assure you that it’s actually good that your business cards have a different job than your truck wraps, than your logo, than your website, etc. To reiterate once more, one size truly doesn’t fit all here. If anything, including the wrong type or amount of info on each advertising medium can actually contribute to what can drive a customer away. But so long as you are properly harnessing each of these mediums, and your company has a strong brand at its foundation to drive those impressions, you should be able to maximize your chances of converting that next customer.
Let’s Get Your Messaging Dialed In
If you need help with your own marketing materials, or maybe you are looking to update the branding that will be powering each of them, we’re here to help. You can give either of our offices a call, or send us an email to start a conversation about your project.
Murrells Inlet: 843.651.6003
Charleston: 843.823.9274
Email: sales@wrapsink.com
