Advertising - Marketing+
Advertising – Marketing+ a collection of papers from PlannedSites for SME's
"What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form." – David Ogilvy
Advertising online is common place in todays market, but we'll be concentrating this paper on offline advertisement. By which we mean print advertising in papers, magazines and journals. In some sectors such as ours - the web industry - it could be deemed as a dying form of advertisement. But if directed in the right way, it can still be beneficial to anyone.
The first principle is that you should be considering advertising for the purpose of gaining new clients. You should not be indulging in “brand” advertising – advertising to secure a better image of the sort where a make of instant coffee assumes enormous sex appeal. Well, you can if you like, of course, but it’s not likely to be cost-effective for a small organisation.
This leads to the second principle – you must be able to measure the success of your advertising. If you are currently advertising in print and can’t measure its success, stop it immediately.
Most small business advertising doesn’t work. It’s done because either everyone else does it or in the hope it might bring in more sales or both. It also boosts the profits of the publication or the commission of the advertising agency so you are unlikely to get this message from them.
The sort of print advertising both they and you ought to be doing is Direct Response advertising, the sort that concludes with what’s known in the trade as a call to action. This could be a phone number or an email address or a website address. If you’re serious about doing print advertising you should have special phone numbers, email and web addresses for the campaign so you can easily and accurately measure the response.
Writing a good advertisement is vitally important but not, because of that, difficult. The subject is dealt with in more detail in the paper “Writing good copy” but here are the essentials.
There needs to be a headline and it MUST be about a benefit or benefits you’re offering the reader. Take the example of an accountancy firm. If you use a headline “Joe Bloggs & Co, Accountants” you would be better off chucking your money down the drain because doing so would at least mean you haven’t wasted time on drafting the advert. During April of each year, when tax returns are dropping on door mats all over the country, a headline saying or suggesting your firm can take the tax-return pain away is offering a benefit and many will read on. You then have to write copy to sustain interest and create desire. And, finally, as we said before, a call to action. This is known in the industry as AIDA –Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Your ad could look like this:
Your tax return simplified
Every year you have the worry of completing
your tax return. Let the region’s leading tax
experts guarantee both the job and a low tax bill.
Call Joe Bloggs & Co now on
0800 xxx xxx
www.joebloggs.co.uk/taxreturn
It is better if the phone number is a special one dedicated to this advert so results can be measured. You will see the website address is not your home page but a landing page. On this page there will, of course, be navigation to your home page but the main purpose of the page will be to “capture” the visitor who has come to this page (remember the only way he can have done is by putting the website address from the advert) rather than ring the number. Why would he do that? Well, because the page should have a Soft Offer, in this case it could be a free ebook on Top Ten Tax Tips and a free subscription to your monthly email newsletter. This then provokes the Call to Action that we mentioned earlier. All he has to do is fill in a couple of boxes with his name and email address and you’ve started a relationship with him.
For a more general advert, in todays market a discounted offer or 'recession busting' advert will also be very effective.
Where to put the advert in your chosen publication? That depends on your budget. Try and secure a top right-hand position on a right-hand page or a full page spread in a magazine. Aim to get the publication into an industry specific publication and ensure that your messages are always consistent.
Test different headlines. Test different copy. Test different publications.
Test, test, test. Measure, measure, measure. measure.
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