Do you ever wonder why your business or venture is not fulfilling its real potential? You’re not alone. Most small business owners today feel frustrated by the fact that they can’t seem to get their life project running at the pace they desire. Sometimes, this is just a matter of having expectations that are too high, but in most cases, there is something that can be done to improve revenue and reach success.
The problem is that you can’t learn how to run a business anywhere, other than through personal experience. This method of ‘try and err’ may not be suitable for everyone, especially since it may come with a heavy financial cost. That’s why we decided to share some tricks of the trade less talked about with you, and for this mission we’ve drafted the wonder child of sales-driven marketing, the establisher and owner of Viking Media – Orel Asformas.
A bit about Orel, first
There’s a reason Orel Asformas was known as the ‘wonder kid’ of the digital marketing industry in his early days. By age 23, this guy had in his resume a few managing positions with a famed creative solution provider for the fintech industry – and left it all to travel around the world and share his wisdom. Today he is based in Czechia and provides services worldwide through his company, Viking Media, specializing in out-of-the-box marketing solutions. Now, he’s here to share some of the industry’s best kept secrets with you.
1. Ta-boo-hoo
When you look around you, especially at other businesses that are your size and in your situation, you see they are constantly looking for a rule book. This hunt for a guide that specifies what you can and can’t do when advertising is what holds a lot of high potential businesses back. Truth be told, there are almost no rules when it comes to effective advertising.
As Orel puts it, “the way to market today is to do it unorthodox style. Don’t do something everyone else does just because you’re afraid to try something that may cause a few eyebrows to be raised. Au contraire, your goal should be to make people puzzled – that’s how you attract their attention among a sea of other messages. The more bizarre your tactic is, the better.”
This means you should fear not of challenging so-called taboos. Nobody knows where the line between bold and unacceptable really is, and even if it really exists, does being unacceptable really hurt you or your campaign? Think of it, while crossing this supposed line may draw negative feedback, these feelings will be forgotten fast, but you and your product will stay in people’s minds for a long time afterward.
2. Go deeper underground
The best way to make yourself remembered is to dig a bit under the viewer of your campaign’s surface. That means you shouldn’t aim at direct, logical explanations as to why your product should be purchased, but rather at planting your product in the viewer’s mind. Subliminal advertising is one form to do that, but Orel has a different outtake on it. “Studies have shown that subliminal messages in ads do not tend to stick as much as we thought and hoped they would.”
So, what is the alternative? “Basically, you need to create a situation where the viewer is emotional when they are exposed to you. This can be an extremely comic situation or even a disturbing or upsetting one. The goal here is to entice emotions in order to make the viewer open up. A situation like that tends to stick inside a person’s memory better, and voila, you’ve planted your product there as well.”
3. It’s not cheating if you don’t get caught?
Let’s wind back a bit to the ‘no rules’ thing we were talking about. If there are no real dos and don’ts here, that means you don’t have to stick to playing fair. We’re not talking about going full on unethical, we’re talking about bending the rules in order to be ahead of the game. For example, you can write a lot of good reviews for your business and send them anonymously to different review sites.
You might think at first that you don’t want to play a dirty game. The problem is, to be quite frank, that everyone else is doing it. By playing fair you risk staying behind – and losing. So, where do you draw the line? Orel has an answer to that question. “You should refrain from certain tactics only if they feel wrong to you, not because someone else has decided that they are wrong or unethical. If you see something done by a lot of other businesses, it means you need to consider adopting that tactic.”