What Small Businesses Can Learn from The Super Bowl Ads
Whether you had a team you were cheering for or you were just there for the snacks, most of us all gathered around a TV over the weekend to watch The Super Bowl. Or as we lovingly refer to it in the ad industry to avoid copyright issues, “The Big Game.”
As a former corporate marketing girl of over 10 years, I tend to nerd out when the Super Bowl rolls around because of the commercials. I always like to see what brands are doing, what the trends/ themes will be and who knocks it out of the park.
Brands spend at minimum $8 million alone just for the 30-second media placement. Then add in all the production costs, talent fees for celebrities and regular talent, agency fees, licensing fees, and more… I would venture to say most of these brands are spending around a minimum of $30 mil, if not more. And if they are buying multiple spot times, you can keep adding that up. It ain’t cheap.
And before I dive into what we can learn as small businesses, let me first say that the Superbowl is not the guiding star for advertising… it’s just the most talked about and eccentric. And now these brands will continue running these ads as long as they can to get the most ROI (return on investment) from their ads.
While these ads are not our goal as small businesses, I still think there is a lot we can learn from them. So let’s dive in!
Know your audience -
This may seem like marketing 101, but it’s a massive piece of your business pie. If you don’t have a clearly defined audience or if you aren’t sure who you are targeting, your messaging will feel disjointed. The saying goes that if you want to reach everyone, you’ll reach no one… but if you try to reach just one, you’ll reach everyone. Basically meaning, you can’t please or target everyone with your brand, but if you hone in on your intended target audience, you’ll reach more people than you realize. So really define your audience. Make sure your website, messaging, marketing and branding is geared toward that audience so that it attracts them.
Some of the ads during the game may not have resonated with you and that’s likely because you weren’t their target audience. Meanwhile if one of the ads really made you laugh or resonated, then you were likely the intended audience.
Your Brand is for them, not you - design accordingly
Similar to the above point, make sure when you are having your website, product, book, etc designed that you are designing for the intended audience and not designing just based on your own preferences. Trust your designer to help you with designing for that audience and try to take your personal preferences out of it unless you are the demographic for your brand.
Be Clear over Clever
So many of the ads during the game try to be so funny or clever that you miss the message or brand completely. My marketing motto has always been clear over clever. And if you are able to be clear while being clever, great! But always, always, always make sure your message is clear to your audience and that your brand is visible. You only have so many seconds to resonate with your audience on social media and any other channel you are communicating to them on so make sure it counts.
Don’t overcomplicate your messaging
Sometimes brands try to do too much at once and they lose the audience. If a young kid can’t understand what your company does, your messaging is likely too complicated. People need to know what you do and how it helps them within a few seconds of encountering your brand. And if you have too much copy on your website (I’m talking multiple paragraphs here), you will lose your audience very quickly! People don’t have time to read a lot of information. They don’t need your whole life story. They want to know what it is you do and how it helps them. It’s that simple.
Make your brand memorable
There are a lot of brands out there and every field is very saturated. So how can you stand out of the crowd for your industry? Make your brand memorable. Don’t hide your brand behind a lot of marketing copy. Make sure your brand is visible at all times and memorable. I know as small businesses we aren’t making commercials most likely, but think of this in a similar realm. If I can’t tell who the commercial is for in the first 5 seconds, you’ve already lost out on brand recall. Apply this to whatever channel you are marketing in to make sure your brand can be recalled easily by your audience. You want to make sure they can attribute your brand to the marketing or content piece you put out there.
Show them the result of your product, not just what it does.
So often brands just want to tell you the features of their product. And those are important details that should be included somewhere, but not the main message. People need to know what the result would be of using your product/ service before they care to know the details of the product/ service. For example, if you are a personal stylist, you want to show them the result of your service aka how confident they can feel in the clothes they wear vs showing them all the services you offer. They will book with you more so based off the feeling you offer them by using your service vs just the service alone. The details are important, but not the first message they should see.
People relate to emotions more than logic
You’ll notice a trend within the game ads. They are either funny/ quirky or they are emotional. This is because people relate best to emotion. We are often driven by emotions before logic. By relating emotionally to your audience, you’ll likely capture their attention more. This is also why funny or emotional content does best on social media. And it’s all about striking a balance. You don’t want all of your posts to be emotional but you want to mix in the emotion when it makes sense. And related to the last point, speaking to their emotion by showing the result of your product/ service vs just the logical side will lead to more conversions.
Test your messaging
I’ve seen this happen many times in the advertising world. A brand comes up with this new campaign and they are so sure it’s going to land, only for it to land them in a big controversy. Hims and Hers took the hit this year for their controversial ad that many called hypocritical. I’ve seen it happen to many brands in the past where the messaging was either tone deaf or missed the mark somehow. To try and avoid this happening, I always encourage small businesses to make sure you are getting other eyes on your messaging before you put it out for the world to see. Make sure you are considering all the ways a message can be perceived, both good and bad before committing to developing assets for it. Many of these big brands have internal teams and legal teams that review their creative and they still get it wrong sometimes. But having extra eyes on your messaging from trusted people can help avoid a controversy.
These are just a few of the tips that we can learn from these big brands that may help us as small businesses. Brands spend a lot of money to be seen and have visibility. And as small businesses, we unfortunately don’t have the budget for large scale marketing tactics. But we can do a lot with our organic marketing and be intentional about any paid marketing we do to make the most of our hard earned money. I’ll write a separate post with some ways we can improve our organic and paid marketing strategies. But for now, I hope this gives us some great things to think about as we evaluate our brands.
