The Dominance Principle applies to all advertising and marketing efforts. It just states that you will never get maximum results from any advertising or marketing effort unless you do it in a dominant way. Although this point may seem pretty obvious, the truth is that most companies are never dominant in any of the forms of advertising or marketing they use. Business owners I’ve worked with often say it’s because they don’t want the volume of business it would create, and the truth is they don’t want to spend the money it would take to become dominant. After all, if you’re really running a business and not a techie selling your products in a self-created job, how could there be too much business?

Let’s start with locating a business as a marketing tool. Some businesses are more location-oriented than others. Certainly the fast food industry falls into this category. Find the world’s McDonald’s, Burger Kings and Wendy’s by paying higher prices for higher visibility locations. You do not find them on the side street where the number of eyes of the consumers is less than what is available to them in the market. It costs more for these locations and the success of these businesses demonstrates the importance of high visibility location to your industry.

Next, let’s look at the use of sales reps. If you have one salesperson and a competitor has 10, which sales force do you think will sell the most? Which will cost more? How many large companies in truly competitive direct selling industries have a small sales force? The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

Now let’s start looking at advertising forms as proof of the dominance principle. How many large companies do you know that do business with the public and rely strictly on word of mouth advertising? How many large companies can you think of that are not a dominant advertiser in at least one medium? For illustrative purposes, I will continue to use the fast food industry as an example because there are numerous points about how it gets business that apply to the principle of dominance.

Certainly fast food chains like the 3 I’ve already mentioned do more than just buy up expensive places. While they use almost every form of advertising available to them, as a general rule, they are relatively dominant in their use of the media they use. The most obvious medium for them is television. They are among the list of dominant advertisers who use television advertising in terms of the amount of time they buy and the cost of their time slots. Keep in mind that the smaller competitors in the fast food industry don’t advertise as heavily on TV as the big three. Is there a correlation?

Television advertising is very similar to radio advertising. You master it by being in a station. You dominate it more by being dominant in more than one season. Generally speaking, if you’re going to run ten ads per day, you’re better off targeting all ten to the same audience on one station than if you run one ad per day on each of the ten stations. Better yet, you’ll generate more sales if you’re dominant with 10 slots per day by running 10 per day at each station. Consider the following story about a business I watched grow from one location to dozens of rentals over a period of a decade. It is a perfect example of the Domination Principle. This is a local tire company that opened its first location and entered the highly competitive tire replacement business. The store had at least 6 chains to compete on day one. The key to the company’s success is its understanding of the Domination Principle.

Certainly there were many forms of publicity that the owner could have considered. The problem was that because he was in a sizable metropolitan area, all the major media—radio, TV, billboards, newspapers, and yellow pages—were relatively expensive to start a business in a single location. For quite obvious reasons, he chose the newspaper, and specifically the sports section of the local paper. This was a logical choice because most of his competitors were there as well.

How could a business from one location be a player in a metropolitan newspaper? As mentioned above, it certainly wasn’t the only tire business to advertise in the sports section. Some of your competitors bought quarter-page and even half-page ads. How could he be dominant? It did this because it was the only tire store that ran an ad in the sports section every day. His ad was about one inch by two columns. It was loaded with prices on various brands and sizes of tires. You left enough space in the ad for your store name, address and phone number, and credit card information.

While it didn’t spend as much money on newspaper advertising as its larger competitors, it was the only tire shop that was there every day. Since he couldn’t dominate with the biggest ad, he decided to be dominant with how often he ran the ad. The ads worked and within a few months he opened a second location. Then he started increasing the size of the ad and eventually grew to three, then four placements, etc.

Having established multiple locations, he began advertising on radio and television. It quickly became the most media-advertised tire shop in the market. Not only was it the most dominant tire store advertiser, it was the most dominant advertiser period! In just a few years, it was the largest tire dealer in the region!

You became dominant in terms of the number of placements, the cost of placements, and the number of ad dollars spent on your business. I watched this happen over a period of years and realized that what he did really wasn’t that unusual. Companies become dominant in their industry by being dominant in their marketing and advertising, in no other way.

Let’s look at two more media, the yellow pages and the Internet. Let’s move on to our three burger giants for a comparison.

They have learned that good locations give them more exposure to potential customers. They have learned that the better the location, the more business they do. They measure a potential location in terms of traffic count and ease of access. They know what is a good location and what is a bad location. It’s all about traffic.

When looking at the yellow pages and the internet, it’s still all about traffic. Eye traffic to be precise. Instead of cars driving down the street, it’s pairs of eyes watching their owners spend their money. The pages being viewed are the streets of fast food restaurants. McDonald’s isn’t going to sell me a hamburger if I don’t pass by their store, and I can’t pass if I don’t see it. With the yellow pages and the Internet, a user can’t do business with you if he can’t see you because he’s looking at a page where you aren’t.

So is placement in the yellow pages and online important? Yes. Do some locations cost more than others? Yes. If you have a better location, do you get a better response? Yes. Just as a company with 10 stores will tend to do more business than one location due to exposure to more traffic, the same is true of the yellow pages and the Internet. Multiple placements in both mediums are important. For example, a plumbing company may advertise in the yellow pages under PLUMBERS, WATER HEATERS, SEWER CLEANERS, etc. and they can optimize your website to focus on more than one keyword. Every additional heading in the yellow pages, and every keyword they go after, is like having another location.

All YP headers and all potential keywords do not have the same value. Some will have more traffic than others, and some will perform better dollar for dollar than others, even with less traffic. The eyes go to make a purchase. The only question is which business will get the sale. Double truck ads in the yellow pages get the most traffic, and the first ad in the header tends to get more than the ones that come after it. The number 1 listing on Google also gets more traffic than those that come after it.

Most business owners think the biggest yellow page ad costs the most, when in fact they are the least expensive. The only accurate method of analyzing cost is by customer. Because the volume of calls from the #1 ad, and therefore customers, will be significantly higher than that of a quarter page ad 10 positions back, the cost per customer will be disproportionately lower. It is this fact in case that is one of the causes of the decline of the yellow pages. The internet has not only eaten into the core of the yellow pages for the past few years, but when it allows double truckloads and full page ads in a phone book headline, it causes unintended consequences. Let me illustrate what I mean. In the Charlottesville market, there are several double trucks and several full page and half page ads in the PLUMBERS headline. A new plumbing business opens its doors and buys in the yellow pages, but like most new businesses, they can’t afford to buy a big ad, so they start with a 1/4 page ad at #16. . What will likely happen the first year for this business owner is sad. He’s not going to get a lot of calls, and he’s not likely to know where the calls are coming from (unless his YP sales rep is tracking the ad for him, which is unusual) because he’s not getting that high of call volume. as for You would have to look at the source. At the end of the year, he may have made a profit, he may not. In any case, he’s not big enough for it to be obvious that he came from the yellow pages, and in most cases, the new business owner is now convinced that the yellow pages don’t work. This is sad, because as much as they have declined in consumer use, they still work when done correctly by someone who knows how to use them in the new internet-based marketplace and declining economy. So, over the years, the YP industry has done a lot to convince advertisers that the yellow pages don’t work and has led them to look elsewhere, like the internet, radio, and TV.

In the same way, Internet search providers like Google must and do take care to allow small businesses to have a large business presence on a small business budget. They have done this by using effective algorithms to run their search engine and offer pay per click programs that literally any business can buy at some level. But, just like with the yellow pages, it takes a knowledgeable and experienced advertiser to reap the most profit online. Many small businesses we’ve worked with were initially opposed to pay-per-click advertising and even SEO because they tried it themselves some time ago and got little results. Most of the time it was because a plumbing business used the keyword PLUMBER, where there is a lot of competition, instead of identifying a small, less competitive niche in the market like WATER HEATER LEAKS. Once the right headline or keyword is identified and a thorough analysis is done, it pays to be the dominant player.

Start your advertising and marketing efforts with a focus on dominating a niche, dominating it, and then expanding. You will earn more money every time.

Alert Media Marketing is a Charlottesville-based national advertising and marketing consulting firm for small and medium-sized businesses.