Marketing: Advertising

Advertising is the best way to market your business or a certain product you are offering. Advertising is how you make your business known to others, how leads are generated, and a way to advance your brand. Depending on where you're advertising and how you are advertising, costs can vary greatly. Obviously, a small newspaper ad is less expensive than a television commercial, but sometimes, a smaller ad can be more efficient.

There are two terms that are important to remember in advertising: Reach and Frequency. Reach is how many people are exposed to an ad, and frequency is how many times people see your ad. Studies show that people need to see an ad nine times before it actually makes an impression on them once. And because prospects usually need to be impressed with an ad at least three times before taking any action, you'll need to place your ad at least TWENTY SEVEN times if you want your prospects to inquire about your business further. Therefore, frequency is extremely important in the process of making sales. Of course, if you don't have enough reach, the return on your advertising investment will be meager.

When creating the ads themselves, many things need to be taken into account. Most people won't even pay attention to your ad if it's not interesting and compelling, and in newspapers and magazines, hardly anyone looks past the headline of an ad unless it catches their attention. But a good headline doesn't make the sale, and an ad must also have interesting and appropriate copy. If you don’t think you can write compelling copy, hire a copywriter to do it for you (they can write headlines, too). If you can, incorporate graphics into your ad, and make your ad consistent with your other communications. Keep ads short and to the point, remember, people won't take much time to read an ad, especially if it's boring. Entertainment is as important as getting the point across, because if you only have the latter, nobody is going to read it.

The point of all advertisements is to generate a consumer response. If you want that all-valuable response, you have to prompt it. In your advertisement, there are many ways to do this. You can give out a toll-free phone number and kindly suggest that they call you for more information. Even better, offer a brochure explaining everything your business does, or, offer them a free gift in exchange for a visit to your Web site or a phone call. By offering a gift, people have more of a reason to call you, but don't make your gift too good, or people will call only for the gift, and this will waste time and money.

Concentrating your ads into one media vehicle (radio, magazines, TV, etc.) is important for small businesses. Sure, you could advertise on the radio, a couple magazines, and a city newspaper, but that's focusing too much on reach and not enough on frequency. Instead, pick one medium and stick with it. The best strategy is to find two or three magazines that are related to your business, and advertise very frequently in those. There are many benefits to this. First, you are only reaching prospects, while if you advertise in a national magazine, you reach people who aren't even remotely interested in your business. Second, it is much cheaper than advertising in a bigger magazine. Third, you may have the opportunity to buy a huge amount of ad space/time, which can get you a discount.

With advertising, there are things called scheduling types, which is how often and when you advertise. There are five types: Continual, Flighting, Front Loading, Heavy-Up, and Pulsing. Continual advertising is just the same amount of advertising straight through the year. Flighting is a large amount of advertising to notify people of your business, then no advertising at all for a month, then a little bit of advertising, then no advertising, then a lot of advertising, then no advertising, then a little advertising… it just goes on like that. This is a relatively cheap yet effective method of advertising, and many businesses use it (remember when you see a commercial and you don't see it for awhile, but then it comes back?) Then there is front loading, which is like Continual in that it goes all the way through the year, but the difference is that when it first starts up, there are a huge amount of ads to build lots of awareness, but then it just goes on with a small amount of advertising that doesn't stop (like Continual). Then there is Heavy-Up, the most expensive type of advertising, and it's like front loading (lots of ads in the beginning), except in the middle of the campaign there is another huge wave of ads. Pulsing is the cheapest type, and can be compared to Flighting, except that there is more distance between individual advertisement campaigns, and the number of advertisements in a given period is always low, like Continual.

It may seem appealing to reuse an ad repeatedly in order to save costs and effort, but then your prospects get bored with it, and the ad becomes less and less effective after each showing. The best time to replace an ad is when you start to find it boring, or when it's been running for four to five months. When using the Pulsing method of advertisement, this is less important, because people usually forget about your ad, and when they see it again, they don't remember it well and so it's like it's almost new to them.

When advertising with TV and radio, keep ads short (unless you think you can hold the audience's attention for a long time), entertaining, and make sure to emphasize your main points immediately. Don't wait till the end of the ad to say the best things about your business, do it immediately. In other words, don't save the best for last. And since television and the radio reaches so many people, invest in someone to write and produce your ad for you, so you know it's good. The last thing you want is to spend a lot of money for airtime and then run an ad that doesn't appeal to the public.

Finally, remember to appropriate your advertising funds intelligently. For a small business, television and radio ads may not be the best thing, because you can't decide who is going to see your ad (the best you can do is air your ad when you think your prospects are listening). Go with magazines, there are many to choose from and even the smallest of magazines usually have a large amount of readers. Newspapers are also a good choice (but not as good as magazines), but make sure your ad is on the section that most relates to your business. If you can't get an ad in the appropriate section, but you still want to advertise in the newspaper, invest in making a compelling ad that goes into another section. You will still reach a lot of potential prospects, and at the very least the ad will power your brand. However, if your business is just starting, selling is more important than branding, but it still is important to try to get some branding in. People buy more from companies they trust, and that's what branding aims to do, establish trust.

*For more information on branding, click here.