Football season has begun once again. That means there are literally millions of fans watching a game every weekend from stadium seats or from their living rooms. And many of them are armchair coaches. They think they understand how to stop an offense from gaining enough yardage to make a first down and do it enough to score a touchdown. Watch the game with them and you will find them playing the role of a defensive coordinator – calling out this player or that one for missing a tackle, scheming to stop the next play, coaching players up from the other side of a TV screen. Football brings out the inner coach in these people.

One of the more common defensive tactics used in football is known as a blitz. It is a simple concept. A football blitz is designed to overwhelm the blockers with hard charging defenders so a quarterback is sacked behind the line of scrimmage. Three things have to happen for a blitz to be successful: surprise, speed and coordination. The offense has to be surprised by defenders who are leaving their normal assignments (like defending receivers going out for a pass) and are rushing the quarterback. The blitz has to happen very quickly, so the defenders reach the backfield before the offense can react and adjust. Most importantly, the blitz has to happen all at once. The defenders have to coordinate their blitz to attack the quarterback as soon as the ball is snapped, not a split second before or after. All the players involved in the blitz have to move together. It does little good for one player to charge across the line of scrimmage while the rest hold their places.

Now let’s talk about using the same method in your marketing efforts. If you are trying to make a quick impact on your target market, you should blitz the market. Surprise them with something that will catch their attention. Advertising has an impact when it has some sort of unexpected element to it – something we did not see coming. However, you cannot expect marketing to work if we are just being audacious for the sake of shocking people’s sensibilities. The surprise in marketing works best when it is wrapped around a pain or a desired pleasure within your target market. We all have discomforts, such as not getting something we want as fast as we would like it. Inconveniences are pain points. When you are marketing, if you can relieve the pain with your product or service, you should exploit the point. Likewise, if there is something about your product/service that enhances pleasure with your target market, take advantage of this point.

A marketing blitz also has to have the dual elements of speed and coordination. Blitzing the market means you need more than one type of marketing method at work and all of your methods need to be integrated to work together, hitting the market at the same time. (Take a look at my previous article, The mosquito on my windshield: Marketing diversity and integration.) For instance, it will do you little good if you place a commercial on TV that drives people to your web site, but the web site is not set up to help them buy your product/service that will solve their pain or enhance their pleasure. And if your social media posts don’t coordinate with the TV ad, you are wasting an opportunity to hit your target market from different angles. And don’t be tempted to piecemeal your methods, using one method this month and another the next. All you will do is weaken your effectiveness. If you are going to blitz, then go all in.

Blitzing your marketing campaign will only be effective if you brand your message and coordinate it in all marketing mediums. I cannot stress this enough. Come up with one message solving the most pertinent problem your customers face. Emphasize this. Don’t try to solve every problem, you will only water down your campaign and confuse your audience. This is one of the most common errors I see businesses make. Someone at the top wants to make sure all their bases are covered in terms of product/service offerings. That’s great – list it under your services on your web site, but don’t put everything in your marketing campaign. Keep it simple and make it say the same thing. Keep all your marketing mediums running in the same direction for the same purpose.