The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Advertisers

By Shane Nichols

Advertising has never been more complicated for the local business owner—here's how to fix it.

Local marketing expert Shane Nichols shares how entrepreneurs have been duped into advertising like their national competitors: through image and brand advertising. Unfortunately, effective branding takes gobs of money, requires a long-time horizon to reap the results, and is difficult to track. In this book, Nichols shares seven habits local business owners can adopt that will enable them to compete with their better-financed big-box or e-commerce competition.

This book covers:

• How the COVID-19 pandemic exposed common marketing mistakes made by local business owners, and how to easily fix them.
• Simple methods for calculating your local advertising's return on investment, helping you easily size up future investment opportunities.
• How to appeal to buyers in every stage of the buying cycle, allowing you to keep your pipeline full of qualified customers.
• How to recognize and get rid of accumulated marketing spend that produces no measurable ROI, and the courage to free yourself from these commitments.
• How to maximize every in-bound call and appointment, and turn every sale into a fountain of referrals and profits.
• How to adapt and sell to later generations, such as Millennials and Generation Z.
• How to develop a unique selling point and distinguish yourself from local and national competitors, with a more personal direct approach to your customers.
• How to spend less on advertising, but still seem like a big player.


About the Author: Shane Nichols

Shane Nichols has spent his entire career in sales, marketing, and advertising. He began in newspapers at The Indianapolis Star and went on to sell for magazine publisher Time Inc. Nichols then started his radio career at Indianapolis radio station WFBQ-FM, one of the country's most profitable radio stations and home to the nationally syndicated Bob and Tom Show. After radio, he shifted to television, working for both CBS- and NBC-affiliated TV stations. He was later recruited by Ivie and Associates, where he developed broadcast and digital media strategy for national retailers including the Safeway and Albertsons grocery chains.
His writing has appeared in Inside Indiana Business, and The Indianapolis Business Journal published his first book, The Intelligent Advertiser: The Definitive Guide to Finding Value in Broadcast Media, in 2018.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098378257

Book preview

HABIT #1:

Don’t Trust Anybody in Advertising

In many ways, the advertising business is like the investment business: salespeople or advisors solicit you to invest in advertising, or stocks and bonds. Both sell assets whose price can fluctuate on the whims of the market, and from supply and demand.

However, in the investment world there is a class of advisor known as a fiduciary, who is legally bound to act in your best interests. They aren’t allowed to make money in ways that create a conflict of interest—for example, encouraging you to constantly buy and sell stocks so they can earn more commissions. Fiduciaries earn money based on performance.

But in advertising, there are no equivalents to fiduciaries.

The advertising world is literally the wild, wild West. And it thrives on dumb money: rivers of cash, billions of dollars flowing from privately held and publicly traded corporations, all pouring downstream into a bottomless pool of media, with no clear expectations for performance.

The destinations of this river are the advertising agencies, consultants, and salespeople who get paid a percentage of every dollar, regardless of the return on investment. They’re incentivized not by performance, but in most cases by activity and volume. The more money you spend, the more they get paid.

In the investment world there are laws and government agencies like the SEC protecting investors, and a laser-like, industry-wide focus on performance, with comparable benchmarks and reams of accessible data and research.

You can visit any number of investment websites, like Vanguard or Fidelity, and find an array of helpful tools and research—all free of charge. Dozens of publications, newsletters, websites, and other sources of information enable just about anybody to become a competent investor.

However, no similar sources of reliable, objective, and readily available information are available in the advertising world. Access to the most important research, such as demographics, ratings, readership, and purchasing data, is prohibitively expensive, is guarded over by a handful of monopolistic corporations such as Nielsen, and is marketed to professional advertising buyers and advisors who won’t readily share it—unless you spend some dumb money with them.

Even if advertising research was affordable and accessible, the data would be incomprehensible to the average business owner (or even a scholar). Its endless sea of acronyms, like GRPs, CPMs, and GRIPs, is a dialect even more confusing than the accounting-based language of the stock market.

And the reliability of advertising research is questionable at best, because until recently, most of the information collected about media consumption came from surveys of small sample groups, where the results were based on people’s memory of their own behavior.

Do you know how radio and television ratings have been largely determined? When I worked in television 2004–2011, the information was 100% compiled from handwritten diaries kept by residents of recruited households, who were asked to write down—from memory—each day’s viewing and listening habits. The results from these tiny sample groups were tabulated and then extrapolated to somehow represent an entire viewing audience.

Billions of ad dollars were influenced by the ability of random people to remember what they listened to or watched that day. Would you invest in a stock if your only guidance as to its merit were the recollections from a small group of investors? Probably not. But that doesn’t stop anybody from spending money on advertising.

In the spring of 2004, researchers from Ball State University published the results of extensive research on media consumption, called the Middletown Media Studies. They used three methods to gather information on media habits: telephone surveys, diaries, and actual shadowing and observation of people while they consumed media.

The researchers concluded that observed media usage exceeded perceived media use—often by large margins. Diaries picked up some of the usage, but well below what was observed. People simply spent way more time with various media than they remembered, perhaps out of embarrassment. Would you admit to watching five hours of TV every day?

In the past decade, new technology has been introduced, like electronic monitoring of radio and TV viewing, but the sample sizes are still alarmingly small. And outside of large markets, the technology hasn’t been deployed—especially in TV—leaving cities as large as Indianapolis beholden to projections from other markets who do have it. This would be like buying stock in General Motors based on guidance from Ford’s financial records because they are similar companies.

Also, amazingly, there is zero measurement for any media consumed outside of the home, like at bars and restaurants.

Digital advertising offers the most accurate data on consumption in the media universe, and that’s part of its popularity. There are clicks, impressions, views, downloads, actual transactions, and more. Still, it’s all very confusing to a layperson. And the landscape is so vast and overwhelming that it has spawned cottage industries of specialists who focus on specific categories like social media, or search engine optimization.

Still, these specialists can’t be counted on for objective advice outside their areas of expertise, because they lack a macro view of the entire media universe. In fact, they often shun anything outside of digital media. Ask a digital specialist to prepare a comprehensive media strategy for a brick-and-mortar-type business, and you will get nothing but a digitally focused media strategy.

I have been a gatherer of dumb money for most of my professional life. I’ve sold every form of advertising: starting in newspapers, then local and national magazines, then radio, then television, and along the way, all forms of digital advertising.

Just like stocks during a bull market, when the economy