Advertising is something most business owners realize they must do, but it is something frequently done following the path of least resistance. In other words, very little effort is put into an advertisement or a marketing plan.

Often, a business owner will look at a competitor’s ad and try to duplicate it, using a cut and paste method. Sometimes, they will take an ad they like from an unrelated company and try to adapt it to their business. These efforts are often designed to please the entrepreneur’s sensibilities with little regard to how well they may attract a customer.

Frequently, the business owner will then proceed to run the ad in the local newspapers or other media, not because they believe that those are the best places to reach their customers, but more out of an ingrained belief that those are the places they should be advertising because that’s “where everyone else does.”

If they have any type of success with the ad, they will continue running it, never changing it out of fear of fixing what’s working. Or, if the ad is unsuccessful, they will conclude that such-and-such advertising just doesn’t work for them.

What most entrepreneurs fail to do is to advertise in areas most likely to reach that market, tailor their ads to appeal to their target market, and vary their advertising to test which advertisements give the best results.

Reaching Your Target Audience

If you are operating a family dining establishment, then mass market media, such as local newspapers, would be a good place to reach a wide audience. Everyone needs to eat, and many people read the paper. However, if you service and repair land excavating equipment, your advertising dollars would be better spent in trade and industry magazines.

You may also want to consider obtaining mailing lists of individuals and businesses that are likely to need your product or services and develop an advertising plan based on direct mail rather than running advertisements in other publications.

For online advertising, you’ll want to research the keywords that your target audience will be looking for, and optimize your website contents and advertisements to take advantage of those keywords.

Getting and Holding Your Prospect’s Attention

Your advertisement should be designed to grab the attention of the people who are within your target market. Many entrepreneurs will simply use a business name, a slogan and contact information, and rely on bold type or reverse print to attract attention. But, they often skip the step of holding on to their propect’s attention once they’ve got it!

Your prospect wants to know what’s in it for them. Why should they purchase your product or service? This is where larger ads, or direct mail pieces, claim the advantage over small ads that may be seen but are just as quickly forgotten.

Long text sells. Some people don’t want to believe it, but there is a reason you see detailed ads in newspapers and magazines, long one-page websites directing you to make a purchase and multi-page sales letters in the mail. The copywriter drags the prospect in, keeps him their and directs him to take an action, whether it is asking for a free sample or making a purchase.

It is not enough to get a prospect’s attention! That is just going halfway, and that is where many business owners end the design of their ad. They think that simply because the ad stood out on the page that people will be motivated to call the number. But, more often than not, they won’t be. If someone is looking for a plumber, and a particular plumber’s ad draws their attention on the page, he may be motivated to give that plumber a call. But, that’s only because the person was pre-sold on needing a plumber!

Where a person is not actively looking, they are not motivated to buy. Long text is frequently used to pre-sell them on a sale, to convince them to buy something they may not have otherwise known they wanted.

Note that this is not trickery. You’re not trying to fool someone into buying your product or service. What you want to do is convince them that your product or service is the one they need, that they should buy from you rather than the other guy and that they should do so now. And, you must do so with honesty, otherwise your profits will be short-lived! It took a lot of work to get a customer; it’s better to have a happy customer who will purchase from you again in the future than to have unhappy customers who will purchase but once, forcing you to rely continually on new customers.

Testing Your Advertisements

Again, business owners will frequently not touch a proven ad. They will settle for a predictable flow of inquiries rather than risk reducing that flow. But, without testing, you cannot know if something else will work better and increase sales!

In some media, testing can be hard and slow. Magazines and other periodicals that are released infrequently are more difficult and time-consuming to test. But, more frequently published media, such as daily and weekly papers, are easier and quicker to test. You’ll know much sooner the results of any new advertisement.

If you run ads in more than one local newspaper, you can run a different ad in each paper and see which ads perform better. One test, unless the results are spectacular one way or the other, may not be sufficient for making any determination of success or lack thereof. You may wish to run the ads for several days or weeks, depending upon the frequency of publication.

If advertising in just one paper, you may wish to try switching out ads on different days or weeks to see how the various spots perform.

If you advertise online, you can try different textual ads, different banner ads and even the content and appearance of your website. You could have the website slightly different for each visitor, and test which versions convert the best.

In all cases, be sure you utilize some type of tracking code so that you know which ad produced which prospect. Your online ads could utilize different referral IDs so you know where the clicks are coming from, your website could be coded to track the prospects and record which version they saw and your printed ads could each have a different code number, that you could ask the prospect for if they call or come in.

And, once you’ve got an effective ad, don’t stop testing! You may want to run that ad the majority of the time, but you’ll still want to keep testing other ads in a continual quest to keep improving and increasing your sales.

Testing will save you money in the long run. Imagine if your original ad had a 2% conversion rate but an alternative ad had a 4% conversion rate. You would have missed out on doubling your prospective customers! An ad that converts better is more cost-effective! But, without testing, you will never know!

If you haven’t been testing your ads, today is a good day to start! Take a look at your advertising matter, and see if you can think of ways to make it better. Then test, test, test!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Del.icio.us | Digg It | Googlize this post! | reddit | Stumble it! | Technorati
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.