The results I have seen achieved from newspaper, phone directory and web site advertising, have been nothing short of amazing. It has all been accomplished using simple, but powerful, strategies.Whether you are running web site advertising or any other kind of advertising – it still needs to get results. Your advertising will cost you the same, regardless of whether it pulls in two sales or does 1000% better and pulls in 22 sales.So, how do you make your advertising work like crazy?Your first task is not to get your prospect to read your advertising. You first need them to notice your advertising. I might be old school but, from years of “hands on” experience, I know that EVERY written advertisement needs a powerful headline. That goes for mail order, phone directory advertising, web site advertising, newspaper advertising etc. Every advertisement needs to grab attention with a powerful headline.When I sort through my mail I do it next to the wastepaper basket. Unless it is something important, or a bill I need to pay, most of it gets trashed.If I spot an eye-catching headline, I might be tempted to read a couple of paragraphs to see what it is all about. The same goes for web site advertising; if the web page doesn’t immediately grab my attention, I will move on to the next web site.So, the first job of any advertising is to get attention. The second job is to keep the reader interested in what you have to say. You just have to get the person to read the first sentence, then the next sentence, then the one after that, and so on. Keep them interested and you may start to create a desire for what you have to sell.Take just one step at a time. Get their attention and then keep them interested. Create a desire. Then, introduce a call to action and ask them to buy.It is really important to work through the process in the correct order. There is no point in asking for the sale if you haven’t first grabbed their attention and created the desired.That is why so many advertisements fail to pull in satisfactory results. A lot of advertisers put their company name at the top of the advertisement (boring!), and expect that to grab the attention of a reader. The business owner might like to see his or her company name big and bold at the top of the ad, but the average reader won’t have the same interest. The reader is more interested in “what’s in it for me.”We are all interested in ourselves and want to know how we can benefit in some way. This is an important point all advertisers need to understand if they want better results from their advertising.Now, before I go, take another look at the headline of this article. You will see it includes a benefit, which is exactly what I have just been talking about. If you have read this far, then you must have been interested in what I had to say. Hopefully you now have the desire to improve your advertising. However, I will stop there and not ask for a sale, because that is not the purpose of this article.The important thing is that you understand the important sequence of the AIDA process – Get Attention, Create Interest, Generate Desire, and then Call for Action.
Category Archives: News
The Future of Business Advertising
The global economy is naturally all about buying and selling and as such advertising is the lifeblood of the economy. SME’s still tend to adopt more traditional forms of advertising such as directories, newspapers, radio ads etc as they are (generally) cost effective in comparison to their marketing budgets.However national and global brands with multi million pound A&P budgets are increasingly looking for more creative and innovative ways to promote themselves and stand out in an increasingly competitive market place.Take the popular US magazine Entertainment Weekly for example, who debuted video advertising in its September 09 edition by placing wafer-thin screens embedded in its pages that promoted CBS TV shows and Pepsi. Gimmick or not, it demonstrated the corporate desire to innovate and appear current.The traditional advertising model will be around for a long time yet, however the future of advertising clearly lies in digital mediums. Google executive, Nikesh Arora, recently stated “People are shifting their spending dollars more and more to the online world – whether it be direct marketing, advertising, or branding and that follows industrial marketing logic, which is that you have to go where the eyeballs are, where the customers are”. That coupled with the fact that for advertisers digital ad platforms allow accurate performance tracking, which is something offline advertising has always struggled with.DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) advertising is an up and coming area with some really innovative concepts being developed. French marketing technology firm Quividi are developing digital signage displays that have built in cameras that instantly identify a passer by’s age and gender using a facial recognition system and then delivers a product that it feels is appropriate – think Minority Report!We already know what a valuable commodity ‘Consumer Data’ is and its link to effective contextualisation of ad messages / message customisation and therefore it is a natural progression that DOOH advertising will follow suit and the worth of digital signage will be as much in its ability to gather data as in its ad revenues.Taking the idea of digital targeted outdoor advertising even further, Holosonics, a US based technology company has developed something called the audio spotlight, aptly named because it can create a tight, narrow beam of sound that can be controlled with the same precision as a torch onto a small area over 60ft away. The DOOH market has naturally taken to this as it enables advertisers to accurately deliver not only their visual, but now also their audio message into a very targeted area.So what of the online world?Facebook:With over 400 million active users on Facebook, this channel is potentially an advertisers wet dream, particularly as Facebook offers advertisers the opportunity to reach targeted and engaged audiences through Facebook ads. These ads are targeted at users based on their likes and interests rather than their searches and although still in its infancy, businesses are now investigating and trialling campaigns to work out how to effectively leverage Facebook ads into their online spend.In Game Advertising:Following on from the initial rush with advertising in ‘virtual worlds’ such as ‘SecondLife’. Advertisers are starting to really understand the benefits of advertising within the gaming community and are being very creative. For example, Zygna (the creator of Farmville) with a current valuation of $4 billion are offering an new approach to in game advertising by incentivizing users to ‘interact with adverts’ by completing brand related tasks such as filing in a form or watching a video, in order to be rewarded with ‘virtual currencies’ to use within their game.With the global gaming industry achieving over $56 billion in revenues it is fast becoming an important focus for media planners, particularly with the growth of social gaming (i.e. on Facebook). As this area matures, advertisers will be able to utilise in game advertising across different platforms.Twitter:Twitter has at last announced the first of its money-making ventures through advertising, with its ‘Promoted Tweets’. Twitter has teemed up with a number of commercial partners such as Disney/Pixar and Starbucks enabling them to place a ‘promoted tweet’ at the top of a ‘trending topic’ on the results page, with the aim to roll ‘promoted tweets’ out across live conversations once they have a better understanding of the users experience and advertiser value.Twitter are measuring this first phase of ‘promoted tweets’ to ensure that they are useful to visitors (resonance). Whether they ‘resonate’ with users will be measured by whether users interact with them, retweet them etc. Twitter has stated that any ‘Promoted Tweets’ that do not resonate with users will not be allowed to continue. With over 4 billion tweets posted in the first quarter of 2010 alone, this is definitely one to keep an eye on and I will be watching this space with interest.Mobile:Mobile ad spend rose by a third to 32% between 2008 and 2009, with brands from the entertainment, media and telecoms sectors spending the largest amounts on the medium, according to the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The UK spent 36.7m in the UK in 2009 despite a contraction in the advertising market in general.So what next for mobile advertising? It seem that it’s all about Location, Location, Location with ‘Location Based Advertising’ (LBA). These are mobile adverts which target users based on their GPS location and have the potential to represent anything from a coupon for a coffee shop around the corner from where you are standing or a car dealer that has the same make and model of car as the one you where searching for on Auto Trader last night. Advertisers could even target a banner advert aimed at a certain demographic that would only appear if you were in the vicinity of their business. Although the market seems relatively small at the moment, the potential for growth is massive.If all of that seems too ‘out there’ for your business, you could always contact Andrew Fischer at Human Headspace – the first man to officially eBay his forehead as advertising space – genius!
Functions That Make an Advertising Agency Significant
A service production facilitated to create and plan advertising for its clients is what we call an advertising agency. It is unprejudiced from the client and supplies an outside opinion to the struggle of marketing the client’s merchandise. An agency can as well handle overall marketing techniques to launch the brand and sales promo techniques of a product for its clients. Usual advertising agency clients take in firms and non-profit organizations.Agencies may well be employed to generate an advertising campaign. An advertising company is an organization that, besides from clients, produces and places advertisement on media, and plans advertising campaigns. Advertising agencies may as well execute other marketing purposes, counting market research and consulting. We may characterize an advertising agency as a sovereign service establishment that deals an agreement with advertisers to administer their advertising. Traditionally, advertising services are of an innovative nature, except the agency concept has inflated to take account of research services.More often than not, these agencies are classified by the kind of market they are trading or the variety of services they are offering. An advertising firm produces advertising material, indentures for publication space, and occasionally embarks on market research on behalf of its clientele. An advertising agency plans and manages all facets of a customer’s marketing. Advertising agencies can specialize in precise areas, such as interactive advertising. Also, they can be a full-service agency which Produces advertising materials like brochures, catalogs, print materials for advertising, media broadcasting promotions, sales letters and many more.An advertising agency is focuses in planning and handling advertising on behalf customers. An advertising office with full-service offers a series of assistance to clients, in addition to booking advertising space, advertisement designs and production, research commissions, providing sales promotion mentoring and function as marketing coach. Research planning, creative concepts, media exposures, productions and accounts are included in departments within an Nearly all advertising agents exert effort on the establishment of a commission on the entire expenses spent by the client. Advertising firms are outside companies that make available for the marketing and advertising necessities of other firms and organizations.A full variety of advertising services and advice based on market research, data gathering on the cultural background and advanced sales techniques are presented by advertising agencies. They can be tangible about a customer’s requirements for promotions since they are impartial from the client company. Various forms of media exposures are utilized to support their clients’ trade or organizations, counting magazine ads, newspaper promotional print outs, radio broadcasting and TV commercials, websites, etc.Other agencies plan events, provide booths at at conferences, and hand out promotional items. Advertising agencies produce logos, creating efficient and striking color schemes to catch the attention of the public specifically the consumers. They engage on organizing marketing campaign materials such as logo creation, brochure printing and creation of slogans and other convincing strategies for sales materials. Agencies may construct public service announcements for charitable organizations and social programs as well, and supply press exposures for new undertakings of the company and products to be launched.. Getting to be acquainted with their client’s industry well and clarifying which demography offers the best audience for marketing is how an advertising agency works.