Lessons From the Super Bowl for Small Businesses

A question came across our desks this week: What can small businesses learn from Super Bowl Ads?

The question was asked by popular American business magazine: Entrepreneur.com

This is the space that we love, so we were fired up to answer. The space, specifically, is the effective use of people’s attention. The days of getting people to crack a smile or cock an eyebrow and calling it a win are dead. Now we need to take that emotional reaction and turn it into a real action right away or else it’s lost.

The question was simple, the answer not so much. The answer that got quoted was:

“Small businesses may not be advertising during the big game, but we all have our Super Bowls: that trade show, the ad in the newspaper or the feature on the local news”

With the addition of social media, the opportunity to extend our own spotlights has never been stronger, or easier to pitch.

All of our businesses have things going on all of the time – sometimes we buy attention in the local newspaper, other times we earn it with an amazing announcement. The lesson that we can lean from the Super Bowl is that the attention that we earn from that moment is not a spike like it used to be – it’s the pinnacle of a mountain, and the impact and reach of the message is entirely up to what we do with it.

Specifically – if you know that there’s going to be a feature happening in a traditional outlet, why not create some teaser content and get people excited beforehand? That will get more viewers to the feature, and deepen the interest of the people who were already planning on paying attention.

More important than the lead up is the follow through. People saw your pitch, and that’s fantastic, now what are you going to do with all of that attention? If you don’t know what the follow-up is going to be then you shouldn’t have started down the path in the first place, because it’s not worth it.

Overall – business people in general need to understand that their marketing and public perception operates in an ongoing wave, rather than as an isolated event. Once they’ve embraced that, then they can start to come up with ideas like GoDaddy that drives TV traffic to their sites and creates real value for the brand.

To see the full original article, check it out at entrepreneur.com.