73: New Years Advertising Resolutions

If the Mayans are right, and 2012 is the end of the world as we know it, you’ll want to make 2011 count. To ensure your company goes out with a bang, permit me to suggest some constructive advertising twists to the most popular New Year’s resolutions.

Lose Some Weight
Take a lot of the unnecessary bulk out of your first impression pieces—ads, direct mail, and signs—and free those pictures and headlines to sell your message. Let your Web site be a glutton for information, but keep your teaser media to just the necessary facts and photographic sizzle. With some exceptions (like farm sales), if the buyer won’t spend the energy to go to the Internet for more information, they’re probably not going to participate in bidding, either.

Get More Organized
Be ready for those red line deadlines by establishing templates and style sheets for each size of direct mail you might use and the typical print & online ad sizes you’ll be using. Not only will design happen more efficiently, but you’ll be building your brand the way Fortune 500 companies do: strict consistency.

Stop Smoking
Habits are comfortable, even the unhealthy ones. We start to see the world through the lenses of our personal traditions and rhythms. The auction culture and rhythm might be all you’ve known but foreign to the person who will pay the most for the asset next up on the block. Make 2011 the year you look at your advertising from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about auctions and cares only about buying what you’re selling. Also, make this the year you see social Web sites as conversation environments, not broadcast channels.

Get on a Budget
Talk to your direct mail printer to create a price grid of your common brochure and postcard sizes and quantities; get prices in advance that you can use to more quickly and dependably insert into your proposed budgets. [If your printer won’t do this, know that several of my print shops do; and I’ll be happy to connect you with them.] Create a spreadsheet of your market’s newspapers’ respective pricing, column widths, and deadlines. You can also take this spreadsheet with you to client meetings. Being able to make knowledgeable adjustments on the fly will impress your sellers.

Further Your Education
Few of us are the source of brand new human knowledge, but we can all be conduits. People who get to knowledge early give the impression of expertise, maybe even inside information. People hire experts; so, find an area where you can be a knowledge collector and dispenser. Subscribe to RSS feeds, email newsletters, social media streams, Google alerts of key terms & topics, and (yes, even still) magazines. Share your links with commentary on your company Web site and/or through social media. Be the person people want to know and follow.

None of us are beyond growth, but we can grow beyond our own momentum. Surprise 2012 by showing up ahead of expectations.
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Spiritually, we’re all conduits of what God is doing in the world. We’re porous pipes, though, in that God lets us absorb what he’s doing and feel his movement through our lives.

We can’t give others what we aren’t receiving. And we can’t receive more from God, if we aren’t dispensing what he’s already given us. When my spiritual gauges are blinking with red lights—either empty or overheated—I typically find remedy by serving others and/or taking a break from my busy, draining world to just absorb God’s truth and presence (usually heading out into nature).

How about you? How do you know when you’re in a spiritual sweet spot? And what do you do, when you feel outside of that sweet spot?

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39: Sideswiping Your Company Image

I’ve got a good buddy what pulled off some crazy stunts in his days before I met him and he met Jesus. One of the stories has never left my memory. His big Ford pickup truck had just endured a significant collision—big enough to collect an insurance check but not big enough to total the vehicle. Thankfully, the damage left no evidence on three of the four sides of the truck—thankfully for him, that is.

See, he wanted to trade the truck for a newer one—and keep the insurance money. So, when he visited the dealer to purchase the replacement, he parked the trade-in’s damaged side tightly against the dealer’s building. After driving off the lot with his new purchase, he received a call from the dealer. “Did you know this thing is severely damaged down one whole side,” asked the salesman.

“Really? How’d that happen?” And now the legend continues.

Many auctioneers have washed and waxed brochures, garage-kept ads, and rust-free signs. Yet their content on listing web sites and sometimes even their own web site is a garbled dump of text from a Word® document. It’s not formatted consistently—or at all. It’s not organized. It doesn’t flow in order of importance. It’s incomplete or filled with errors that “we will get right, once we get the brochure approved.” In attempt to show sellers they’ve started the marketing process, they “just throw something up there with the date for now.” Depending on when a prospective buyer—or the seller—views the site, they might see very different presentations and different levels of professionalism.

If you want maximum value for your brand, when you try to trade it for transactions in the marketplace, you need to treat the Internet like you do other media.

A good start would include

• creating a style sheet similar to what you have for your print and sign media
• assigning only one or two people to manage uploads for a consistent workflow
• discovering and saving the HTML color numbers (a six-digit alphanumeric code) of your logo
• developing an information sheet that must be completed with all major information before initial posting

Good short cuts to consider include

• typing regularly-used formatting code items (like bold text, hyperlink, email link, bullet lists, etc.) into a document for copying and pasting
• using coded/formatted content from one web site to paste into the next
• collecting and saving links to community, collector, and/or government web sites related to the subject property

Consider going the extra mile by

• asking design vendors to color/contrast correct images before uploading to web sites (assuming they do this for your other media)
• avoiding the use of “auction” and other generic terms in headlines of auction calendar listings or listing sites
• breaking content into smaller chunks and line-item lists
• using ALL CAPS sparingly, if at all

Web sites are no longer the last resort or cheap add-on of the marketing mix. Treat them like the primary media they are, and the buying (and selling) public will find your content easier to absorb. The easier information can be assimilated, the more approachable you make your auction. You don’t need me to tell you what that, in turn, will do for your income and brand.
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Yesterday, I listened to a podcast by Joel Thomas (North Point Community Church), talking about wisdom. He boiled the pursuit of wisdom down to one key phrase: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” The application was that we need people with access to our lives and the permission to speak biblical truth into them, to fill the gap of knowledge and perspective of our situations and spirits.

We can get some of this in a pew, similarly to how we would from a college class. But life transformation requires more intimate encounters with spiritual leaders, even if not from the highest leadership levels of our local churches.

We need authentic community where we vulnerably make ourselves available to the insight of others and the outside perspective on our blind spots. We need someone to tell us what we don’t know—not just about God and the Bible but about ourselves. We can have three sides of our vehicle immaculate and still be a wreck; so we need to submit ourselves for close examination to maintain maximum value to the kingdom.

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