Shopping Cart You have 0 items

Client Login

You're much more likely to listen to what other people have to say

“Throughout the consultancy, Holloway’s has helped us to improve our sales training. We now have a much shorter sales process and the sales training has helped us to sell even more! Our testing and measuring has also identified campaigns which we know work for our business.”

Tony Hill
Tuaropaki Communications

4 Reasons most advertising fails

Failed marketing is a subject most managers would rather forget. How many times have you personally spent money on new marketing only to discover it didn’t work!

Thousands of NZ business people suffer the same disappointment every year. Yet there is no need for this to happen. The fault, says Holloway Advertising, is not yours. The problem lies with the marketing professionals you hire, if they don’t know how to boost your profits with marketing. Here are the four secrets about what has been going wrong with your marketing.

1. You didn’t tell your customer what they wanted to know.
Designers think that ads should be works of art (sound familiar?). Ad agencies are hell-bent on entertaining your target audience with humour and pun and many media reps just want to sell you space. Yet research shows your customers are natural window shoppers – they are looking for products that interest them. They want to know whether your product can make their lives more pleasant. This means that telling your customer what they want to know in your marketing is JUST AS IMPORTANT as what your marketing looks like. You MUST combine good design AND what your customers want to know if you want your marketing to boost your profits.

2. Your marketing did not tell a ‘selling story’ or appeal to the ‘self-interest’ of your customer.
Your customer wants to know ‘what’s in it for them’ – does your product have something they like and enjoy? If so, your ad must tell them and it must do so quickly. If it does not, the TV watcher, or newspaper reader, will move on and you will have wasted your money.

3. Your customers did not associate your ‘brand’ with a benefit.
There is an enormous amount of money wasted on what managers wrongly think of as ‘branding’. Many managers think of branding as a look that must stay consistent in their ads. They hope that this will have a magic effect on sales. But most of them are disappointed, because unless your customers associate your brand with a benefit, you’ve wasted your money.

4.You didn’t make it clear who your ad was for.
Eighty percent of people will only read the headline in your brochure, website or newspaper ad. And they only take notice of the first few seconds of your radio ad or TV commercial. If you have not summarised your selling story in those few short moments, you have WASTED ALL YOUR MONEY

"It's imperative to ensure that you understand these four reasons so that you don't have to make the same mistakes over and over. Once you've worked out what not to do it's time to move onwards and upwards. Why not come along to our FREE Marketing Seminar where you will learn the 4 steps to marketing profits."

Mark Holloway

If you want to succeed, really succeed – then more of your marketing ‘experiments’ will fail than succeed.

Keep a record of everything you try in marketing. Your Black Book (the file of EXPERIMENTS that fail), is actually more important than your White Book (the EXPERIMENTS that succeed). Read more

Want free marketing tips delivered straight to your inbox?

FREE Marketing Tips for Kiwi Businesses!

Our regular FREE Marketing Tips for Kiwi Businesses newsletter is available now by email. We’ll send you frequent free information packed with tried and tested ways to increase enquiry and convert more sales. We’ll also teach you ways to sell more to existing customers and why it’s so important to look after the customers you already have. You’ll learn what sort of media works best when advertising and why this is. These top tips come from the Holloway team’s own experience of our internal marketing as well as things we have learnt through providing marketing expertise to clients all around New Zealand. With regular updates emailed to you, you won’t want to miss any of them. Simply complete the form to the right, to receive this newsletter jam-packed with helpful information and advice.

Signup for our FREE 'Marketing Tips for Kiwi Businesses' Newsletter

Simply complete the form below to receive free helpful information and advice on marketing, sales and advertising delivered right to your inbox!