What is High Impact Marketing?

High Impact Marketing is the way to get the maximum return on your investment. It contains all the elements of medium-impact marketing but takes them one step further.

This type of marketing is creative and deliberately goes against what everyone else is doing in the field or has traditionally done.

While this form of marketing is creative, there are a few rules that need to kept in mind. These are:

Define Your Audience

High Impact Marketing works when it is focused like a laser beam. It has to have a specific audience. If you try and hit everyone you'll hit no-one. Part of what makes High Impact Marketing works is that it engages with your target audience.

Know Your Audience

Once you've defined your audience then you need to make sure that you know them. You need to think like them. You need to ask:

Think Outside the Box

This is the most important part of High Impact Marketing. You have to do something different and completely unexpected. A good recent example is the Cadbury's "gorilla" advert. This was very different and was a clever advert.

My only problem with it was that it grabbed your attention and then didn't do anything with it. It seemed to purely exist to raise brand awareness of Cadbury's. This is fine if that is all it was intended to do.

In my view, later Cadbury adverts went a bit awry as they became more and more surreal. There is sometimes a fine line between High Impact and just plain "out of touch". If you're trying too hard to make an impact then you can sometimes be lead down a blind alley. You can almost get too exclusive, e.g. "this advert will appeal very strongly to Dr. John Smith from South Croydon".

Actually that last line was one of those "in-jokes" that only works on a very limited audience. John Smith is the alias sometimes used by Dr. Who and South Croydon is where Sarah Jane Smith lived. As you can see from the example it can get quite obscure. However, if you're deliberately targeting a group of classic Dr Who fans then this might be a good move.

I remember a good business friend of mine once tried to make a virtue out of saying something completely inappropriate by saying "Yes, I'm a professional and I just said .....". This is where high impact doesn't just cross the line, it pole-vaults over it.

Follow the Rules of Medium Impact Marketing

There is a lot of marketing that attracts interest but doesn't covert it into sales. This is the type of marketing that wins awards instead of customers.

I read a marketing book recently where the author was obsessed by clever marketing that would make people look and think "that's clever" but wouldn't get them to buy.

Clever marketing is usually high impact, but to achieve the maximum return you need bear in mind the rules of medium impact marketing. It is easy to get carried away with making an impact and forget the reason you are doing, i.e. to make a sale.

The Key Rules Again Are Have:

• An Attention Grabber
• A Compelling Headline
• An Offer
• A Reason to Respond Now
• Trackability

Follow these rules and get maximum return.

For some examples of High Impact Marketing, get in touch request my High Impact Marketing pack and I'll send it out to you.

Avoid the Marketing Myths