Owners and managers often become obsessed with creating the perfect ad… you know the one that will have prospective members lining up outside the front door, cash in hand, ready to sign on the dotted line.
Sorry, but that kind of reaction is beyond the power of any single ad… even the late great Steve Jobs needed a 90 minute presentation to get the Apple faithful to get their sleeping bags and camp outside an Apple Store.
The problem is that no single ad can say everything to everyone; of course that doesn’t stop many of you from trying.
But inevitably, the more you focus on women the more men you alienate, the more you focus on baby boomers the more of the young adults you alienate, the more you focus on group exercise the more of the weights guys you lose, the more you focus on the hardcore exercisers the more of the beginner crowd you alienate…
At law there is an expression for it…”expressio unius est exclusio alterius” or the expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other.
By expressly mentioning one thing you are by implication excluding the others. You know what happens when your buddy tells you that his female friend has a “nice personality” you immediately infer that she is unattractive.
Of course you have to target your marketing but you’re damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t.
And advertising is so expensive, who can afford to have multiple versions of your message in the marketplace… all the time? It’s just not practical.
Well it wasn’t before iPOS advertising… with iPOS you can have a hundred (or more) different ads, specifically targeting different markets, where they congregate, generating tens of thousand of exposures every month for less than a tenth of the cost of direct mail.
Stop going crazy trying to develop the perfect ad… develop a hundred of them.
Check out the free preview chapter and the New Rules of Marketing report where we discuss iPOS advertising in more detail.