Secrets to Online Success
By Shahar Boyayan

There are many things you can do without spending money, but that reinforces the image that you want the market to perceive from you. Then this brings us to positioning. A lot of people open their businesses, and they start advertising in newspapers, billboards, and a lot of things.

You have to understand one thing. There is promotion, and there is advertising. They are both good, and they both work, but there is a certain time where you should approach one way or the other. For example, when you are a very young company and nobody in the market knows who you are, you have first to impress their minds so when they think about your service, they know, “This guy is doing that.” Let's say you do flower preservation, for example, but nobody knows who you are. What do you think happens when you put an ad on TV or on a billboard? It really doesn’t do much because advertising is meant to bring forth something people already know.

You first have to promote yourself in order for them to know exactly what you do. There is a time for advertising, and there is a time for promotion.

You also cannot keep on trying to do what the leader of the industry is going to do, because you are never going to reach the same point in the mind of the consumer. For example, you have Coca-Cola, and it's the first one in soda pop on the Cola segment. Well, no matter how much money Pepsi spends on advertising, it's always going to be the number two, because the number one in the mind of the consumer is already taken.
So, what do you do if you're a soda? Well, you could have the approach that 7-Up did when it came into the market. Instead of competing with the Colas, it came as the un-Cola and found a new place in the mind of the consumer, and it sells really well. I hope I was clear on this.

We often hear that we have to advertise because that’s how, say, McDonald’s does it. McDonald’s advertises billions of dollars and that’s how they get known. But really it's just a misunderstanding.

People don’t get it that McDonald’s has already made an impression. They are already in people’s minds. Advertisement in that case serves as a reinforcement, as a reminder to say, “Hey, we're out here. Come back!”

Small businesses don’t understand that they first have to get into people’s minds. First they have to let people know that they are there, and then they advertise to remind them.

This is called positioning when you position yourself in the mind of the consumer. This is the first thing, and this is done through promoting yourself. When you are established in the market, then you go to advertise. So, I think we have this part clear.

 

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