If you could master the art of advertising, you would soon be an extremely rich individual. An “Advertising Master” could not only sell just about anything, for any price, but could also sell his or her expertise to others for untold sums of money, especially if that Master could guarantee results.
Now the bad news. Becoming a true Advertising Master is probably as difficult and time consuming as it might be to become a nuclear physicist! Advertising is that hard! Advertising is that elusive! Advertising is that much of a mystery!
Advertising is like writing a brilliant poem on the sand of a beach. Just when you have written a masterpiece, the tide comes in and washes it away forever. Then when you try to rewrite the poem, it turns out not to be so brilliant the second time around – even if you wrote the very same thing. The poem may stay the same, but the world around it changed. It lost it’s the original relevancy that made it brilliant the first time around. That happens with great ads all the time.
Is this starting to sound like a philosophy lecture? But here’s the thing about advertising: You never know what good advertising is until it works. That means you can’t tell if an ad is a good, effective ad before it is actually used.
Now, let’s get in touch with reality here. We know a lot about advertising. We know a lot about what works and what does not work. It’s just that there’s never 100% certainty about anything. Add to that fact that advertising tends to be extremely expensive and you have a very delicate situation, indeed. Still, very few businesses can exist without doing at least some kind of paid advertising, and very often, advertising can be a tremendous source of new customers, business and profit for just about anybody who is selling anything.
When advertising is done right, the profit it can bring to a business can be truly spectacular. That’s why it’s so tempting to roll the dice with your ad budget. But when it comes to advertising, what you need is a healthy dose of common sense, combined with a strategy that risks only as much money as you think you can afford to lose.
First of all, one must decide what kind of advertising is right for the business type. The choices are:
· print advertising in things like newspapers, magazines and other specialty publications.
· broadcast media eg. radio and television.
· internet advertising is a whole new and different kind advertising world in itself
· directory advertising
· billboards and poster sites
· promotional advertising
It can all be pretty intimidating. What advertising vehicle is right for you? What if you only had £1,000 to spend. Is it best to spend that £1,000 on an ad or ads in the local newspaper, take out an ad in the Yellow Pages, or maybe buy some radio time on a local station. If you only have £1,000 to spend, which should you choose to gain maximum effect? And by maximum effect, we mean bringing in more than the £1,000 you spent on that ad!
Well, we’re only going to talk about some general principles here and give some basic guidelines. That’s because literally whole libraries of books have been written on the subject and art of advertising, and we simply can’t cover it all here. It’s a subject that is nearly inexhaustible, and any entrepreneur worth his salt should be spending a lot of spare time reading up on all the advertising information he or she can get his or her hands on.
First, never buy a large print advertisement without testing a smaller less expensive ad first. Maybe start with a classified ad, or very small space ad. If the results are promising, you can reasonably upgrade to a bigger more expensive ad in the same publication. The key is test and measure! You must have a system to determine that the ad you bought is responsible for the leads you get from that ad. It’s not always easy. Take the case of a restaurant.
Let’s say that Restaurant A buys an ad in the local newspaper. How do you know that the people who come into the restaurant are doing so because they were prompted to do so by the ad in the local seo 服務 paper? Is it reasonable to ask every patron who comes in if they saw your ad in the paper? Probably not. But if you included a clip out coupon in the ad which patrons can bring in for a 10% discount, you can get a pretty good idea of how well the ad performed. Simple techniques like this can make all the difference.
Companies that sell things via mail order key their ads to show where each order sent in came from. All orders which include a key from a print ad will show exactly how well the ad performed. This is an almost 100% accurate way to test a print ad.
But what about a radio ad? How could a restaurant advertising on a local radio station determine if their broadcast ads were working? It’s a lot tougher. You could ask patrons to mention your radio ad when they come in, but this is unreliable, to say the least. If business suddenly increases when the ad runs, you might reasonable conclude that the radio ad is working, but you can’t be 100% sure. It’s a tough call, and the smart restaurant owner will have to decide if the radio ad is worth it or not. If business continues to be brisk while the ad runs, it’s probably a good idea to keep it going.