Advertising top tips

Most businesses at some time try out advertising.  In fact, if you were to survey a random selection of people, most would tell you that marketing and advertising are the same thing.

There is no doubt that advertising is part of marketing, but it is far from the whole story.  A useful description of marketing is “a co-ordinated range of activities aimed at getting your message across to your target audience, delivering the right message, to the right person at the right time”. Advertising is part of this mix, and just like any other marketing activity it needs to be supported by additional activities.

Here are some key points to consider when you are thinking about using advertising to find new business opportunities.

Target the right people

is essential that you understand who you are trying to reach with your advertising. This will enable you to decide which media and publications are the right ones for you.  There is little point in advertising in publications which are not read by your target audience.  This might seem rather obvious, but it should not be overlooked.

Before you commit to advertising, talk to the publications that you are considering using. They should be able to give you independently verified information about their readership – broken down in a number of different ways such as geographically, by age range, by job title, and many others.

Measure your results

Measuring the success of an advert will help you to make decisions about future advertising.  It’s relatively easy to set up a promotional code to include in your advert that will allow you to register responses and decide whether or not you have spent your money wisely.  These promotional codes can also be linked to special offers that you may decide to run (see below).  The ability to measure results is fundamental to any marketing programme, so try to apply this to any advertising that you do.

Special offers

We all like to think that our product or service is so good that potential customers will just buy it once we have told them about it.  But if you think about your own buying behaviour, you’ll understand that people generally have a resistance to buying – and this resistance needs to be overcome.  One way of doing this is to make a special offer in your advert. Examples of such offers are:

• A price reduction for a limited time (good) or for the first 100 customers (very good)

• An additional ‘value-add’ for people who respond to the advert.  For example, in the business-to-business arena you might offer a free business consultation worth £950 to the first 25 respondents

• A buy-one-get-one-free offer (abbreviated to BOGOF)

Take a look at your competitors to see what offers are around in your sector.

Tell people what you want them to DO

You must be clear and direct in telling people what you want them to do having seen your advert. Simply putting your email, web site and phone number in the lower right corner will not do it. People are busy and do not have time to decipher the meaning of your ad – so make your call to action big, bold, and completely unambiguous.

Don’t be afraid to experiment

In order to find out what works, you need to experiment.  You and your colleagues will no doubt have strong opinions on what should work as an advert, but the real proof is in the results – nothing else matters.  On-line marketing is particularly good for this, as you can have two or three adverts running at the same time, each being shown an equal number of times.  Set up a way of measuring the response to each of the adverts, and immediately you will learn which one works best.

The headline is crucial

The headline is what makes people stop and read further. Top advertising writers spend 75% – 80% of their time working on the headline, with the other 25% devoted to the rest of the advert.  Without an attention-grabbing headline, the rest of your effort could be wasted.

If you consider each of these points when you are planning an advertising campaign, you will see better results for your business.

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