Grabbing the audience's attention is easier than most people think it is. There are really only a few steps you must take in order to do so.
First, you have to have an audience that is interested in what you have to offer. This seems obvious and elementary, but you would be surprised how many companies are targeting their advertising and marketing to the wrong audience. Get this right before you go to the next step.
Second, you must understand the fine line difference between being "unique" and "weird." Unique attracts positive attention, weird attracts negative attention. If you get this right, there will be some people who will fall on either side of this fine line. You want the majority to fall on the unique side. The ultimate test? Try out your ideas on several age groups but pay the most attention to what your teenagers say about your trial balloons. Teenagers have particularly good radar for picking out weird, even in an industrial B2B setting.
Pass steps one and two and you are ready to plan for grabbing the audience's attention.
Now, I am going to use as an example a venue that I don't particularly like--the trade show. I think more money is wasted on trade shows than in any other marketing effort in the pulp and paper industry. Thirty years ago was a different story, but this is not 1985 is it?
So, your boss gives you $10,000 to spend on a booth at a major pulp and paper conference at the World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA and says her objective is to have a physical presence at this conference. You check prices of producing booth materials, renting the booth and so forth. You find yourself in a 10 x 10 booth in a long line of other 10 x 10 booths. You know already that no one is going to remember you a week after the conference.
There is another way to go to make you stand out from the crowd. First, rent a roving sign truck (those skinny trucks that drive up and down city streets with essentially a moving billboard on either side). Have this truck, with your cleverly prepared billboard, drive up and down the street in front of the Georgia World Congress Center all day long for the duration of the conference. Every conference attendee will see it and remember it, for you are not in that long line of "me too" 10 x 10 booths.
You'll have plenty of money left over. Buy a spot every week on Pulp & Paper Radio International for a year. This takes your message to continuous from just being a spot message of one week (or three or four days).
You will still have money left over. Your boss will be smiling. You will be smiling. Next year, when you have been promoted into your boss's position, you can tell your replacement to wash, rinse, repeat.
What if this idea becomes so popular that this space becomes crowded? Don't worry, I'll come up with new ideas for you. I wouldn't worry about it becoming too overcrowded though, it takes great perspicacity to break the mold of doing what everyone else does.
Jim Thompson is CEO of Paperitalo Publications.
