The Secret to all marketing and promotions The 40-40-20 Rule

By Robert Provencher

There’s a very important formula that is used. It’s called the 40-40-20 Rule. This applies to all industries, no matter what you’re selling.

This applies to all marketing, ads and promotions and it goes like this: 40% of the success of your ad or promotion is determined by the recipient of that ad or promotion.

In other words, the crowd who is specifically receiving that particular offer. The other 40% is the actual offer itself. And the final 20% is the media, or, how you are delivering that offer to that specific market.

When you look at all promotions and ads that way, you’ll see that there is far less importance placed on the media.

The main problem with most photographers is they jump right into media, the 20%, and forget about the other 80% which is broken up into 40% and 40%. Big mistake.

Let’s look it over one more time and see if we can apply it a little more strategically and use it a little more intelligently in our photography studios.

There is a saying that says, “Give me a hungry crowd over any other benefit or feature”. This is key and very important. No matter what it is you are trying to sell in your photography studio, you have to find the crowd that is the absolute most hungry for that specific service or product.

If you market using mass media, and you market to all the masses, you’re really wasting a lot of money and a lot of time because you’re not narrowing down that 40% to what is considered to be the hungry part of that market.

For instance, it’s quite obvious if you’re going to market a baby’s first year wall panel, you want to really target people who are having a baby. That 's a no- brainer.

What about families? What about seniors or graduations or weddings? If you break down each and every aspect of all the services and products that you offer in your photography studio, you can easily determine where that specific market can be found.

I talk a lot about affiliation marketing. I won’t get into great detail in this article, but affiliation is a great way to market to specific target markets. You can go after stores, organizations, associations, and of course the best target market of all is your past clients, your database.

It is so important to determine and to discover and look for and find where that hungry crowd is for that specific product that you are offering so that you can identify them and go after them with the cheapest and most effective way possible.

The other 40% is your offer. If you discover the right market and your offer is boring, you’re not going to get great results. You want to create offers that are exciting, tantalizing. Offers that really resonate with that specific target audience.

When you combine these two portions of your marketing (finding the right target market, creating the right offer) and you put them together; hypothetically speaking, you could take that and write out that offer on the back of a pizza box because the other two factors are there.

They don’t care if they read it on the back of a pizza box, per say, because you’ve done your homework and you know there’s a high probability that that specific target audience is going to respond to that specific offer.

It’s very important to follow the logic flow of events when you’re creating your marketing and ads and promotions. It is absolutely vital that you do it in order.

The big mistake, again, that most of us do is we jump to the 20%, the media. The even bigger mistake is that we jump to big media. We start throwing all kinds of money often under the advice of a creative director who works for an ad agency or to a graphic designer or a webmaster.

These people have littleidea how to discover your target market and have very little idea how to create exciting offers. Think about it. You're just another project piled high on their desk.

Only YOU know your crowd and your offers. It’s a responsibility that you should look into and you should take that proverbial bull by the horns and make it happen for you.

When you look at all great and successful businesses, they all started across the kitchen table. Somebody had a great idea and they found the audience for that particular product or service. And they started working 1 client and then 2 clients then 3 clients then 4 and grew their businesses that way.

Without exception to the rule, all great businesses started very, very small and that’s how you want to start. You want to avoid the trap of jumping to the 20%, the media, like as if it has some magic powers, like as if doing that will make it all happen for you.

As you can tell, it’s a big mistake to skip the first two steps. I remind you, there’s a very powerful calling when it comes to the big media, especially when the sales representative or creative designer who appears to have magic powers and all they have to do is wave their wands and create really nice looking pretty looking image ads which are non-measurable and image building which in affect is not responsible.

40% of your success for your marketing and advertising and promotions is your audience; who’s the crowd. The other 40% is your offer. And then finally the 20% is the media, the deliverables.

Whatever method you use to deliver is really not that important compared to the first two steps where you have to find the right audience and you have to bring them the absolute best offer. The key, the big secret, is to go looking for the hungry crowd and offer em up some sweet, irresistable offers.

Main Menu

The Secret to all marketing and promotions The 40-40-20 Rule