Why You Should Not Create Your Own Advertising Strategy

Business columns and business coaches often dedicate much of their time to telling entrepreneurs and business owners that they must be revolutionary in their advertising strategy and be unique if they want to win.

However, the reality is that as an entrepreneur or marketing executive, achieving a successful advertising strategy can often be a difficult tightrope walk between doing what is working for others and offering a unique proposition.

There are two problems with developing your own advertising strategy from scratch. First, it can mean ignoring the facts and figures and the tried and true methods that are working in the current market. Choosing just to learn from your own mistakes rather than others is costly and can result in losing any lead time you had on your competitors. Secondly, creating an advertising strategy that is too far away from the norm can be confusing to prospects and consumers, not only reducing your advertising effectiveness and the ROI of your marketing budget but alienating many viable customers.

In order to develop a truly successful advertising strategy, you really should take the best of both worlds. If a certain marketing strategy, channel, or platform is proving to be incredibly profitable in your industry, you shouldn’t ignore it. Consumers will be looking for some of the similar attributes in order to find your product or service and judge it’s value and credibility. However, at the same time you need to be different enough from your competition to differentiate enterprise and stand out from the crowd. The perfect example is books. While self-publishing is becoming more popular than ever and has turned out many of the best sellers in the last couple of years, it remains an independent way to produce books; nevertheless, authors can definitely benefit from promoting their books on reputable sites like Amazon or by using Facebook likes and a familiar blog or website format for promoting it. What will you take from the proven and comfortable way of doing business in your industry and what will you do differently to develop the ultimate advertising strategy?

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