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Advertising is on life support but it is not dead. Although it seems that advertisers and their agencies are trying to kill it.

When done correctly, it still has its place in the marketing mix. The problem with advertising, as in so many marketing tactics, is that companies launch ads before they really think their program through.

First, let’s think about what we want our advertising to achieve. You should tie your advertising objectives to the objectives you have for your business. Ask yourself what benefits advertising can help bring to the business.

Are you looking for new customers who don’t know you? Are you trying to get a share of your competitors’ customers who know a little about you? Or, are you trying to get your own customers to buy more from you? The answers to these questions will help you establish what type message is needed because one ad cannot address all carbon-based life forms. Ads need to be aimed at specific audiences. And media dollars, if you’re fortunate enough to have them, are precious, so let’s target the ad message as we’ll need to target that media spending.

Prospects need to have their interest aroused, while you might need a “make a change” message aimed at competitors’ customers, and your own customers may respond best to a loyalty message.

Now, you should determine how best to get your message out. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising says that advertising is “the means of providing the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects at the lowest possible cost.”

This means that there are lots of ways to deliver your advertising message. You are not limited to the big three: radio, TV and newspapers. Direct mail might be a better answer for you if you have a narrowly defined audience. Going after a mass audience may mean you need mass media. Remember: it’s the most persuasive message to the right prospects at the lowest cost. And with corporate advertising spending, remember the old adage, “Nothing happens until the cash register rings,” and adjust your message and media decisions accordingly.

Marketers tend to overestimate the power of advertising. They want to hit the market with a big campaign and receive a flood of new business. Here’s the dirty little secret: most people ignore most advertising. It can’t make people do what they don’t want to do, nor interest them in what they are not interested in. Advertising is a crutch – a strong, efficacious one when done right, but additive to the rest of your communications programming. Repeat that mantra until you determine that advertising is additive or not to your overall program.

Your job as a marketer is to do the heavy lifting up front to develop a compelling message, and deliver it effectively to a specific audience using the right medium. Otherwise you are wasting your time because your ad campaign will be dead on arrival.

By: Harry Hoover

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Whether you are a full time affiliate marketer or running a business, online or off. Your success is going to depend on the advertising you do.

All successful business owners will tell you a huge amount of their time and/or budget goes into advertising. So to keep from wasting your valued time or your hard earned money, it only makes sense to make wise choices when you advertise.

Fortunately for those advertising online there is a huge market of widely varied free promotion. Giving you much freedom to test which types, of ads as well as ad sites, work the best, before you have to pay anything out of pocket. Once you know what is working then you can make better choices in what you spend your money and time on to advertise your business.

By using the free options wisely you will find out very valuable data to help you with future promotions. Such as:

What type of free ad site works best – i.e. Safelists, Classified Ads, Free For All – FFA sites, Banner Exchanges, etc.

What ad titles and ad copy, or banners do best for each type of ad site.

What day of the week and the time of that day gets you the most traffic for your effort.

By comparing sign ups or sales on a particular day or per month, you will even be able to tell the conversion ratio per clicks.

To find out the above data you will need a good tracking program or software. Choose one that allows you to make separate campaigns which will create a unique URL for each. So you can have the freedom to create a campaign for specific ads such as an ad with a certain title, or for example where you are promoting, such as classifieds, ffa, safelists, etc. Then also at the very minimum you will need to be able to track unique hits, IP address, days/months/hours and of course Referral URL’s – where your hits are coming from. I also highly recommend using a tracking system that does not put a ? in the tracking URL, it gives you to use, as this will cause problems with many of the free ad sites on-line. Many times everything you have after the ? will get cut off, rendering the URL useless as it will not take the person reading the ad to the right URL you set up in your tracking system.

Once you have the ability to track your ads you are ready to create some titles and copy. After creating them, then go to your tracking and create campaigns based on them. How you do this depends on what is easiest for you. You might simply create campaigns named ad1, ad2, and so on or as mentioned above you can base them on the type of ad site and possibly name them ffa, classads or sl for safelists. Save your ads in .txt files and put the unique tracking URL with each ad, for future comparison while analyzing the tracking results.

After you master how to track your ads you will then know what to spend your money on if you decide to pay for advertising. There are many options out there from safelist and ezine solo ads to whole packages which include multiple methods all in one. But for an example if you see that regular safelist promotions are working well for your ad, then that will tell you more then likely a paid solo ad will do even better. Or say you find a particular headline that does really well in the classifieds, this might be a good candidate for some paid text ads in ezines, safelists or on web sites that sell them. The same goes for banner ads. Try different ones out in the many free exchanges out there, tied to a tracking URL to let you know where, when and how you get clicks. If a certain banner does well, it will probably be worth putting it on some paid banner sites. And so on…

If you are like most of us out here, budgets are tight and time is even more limited, so don’t waste another minute… Get started gathering the information you need to make wise advertising choices for your business promotions.

Sincerely, Debbie Ducker

By: Debbie Ducker

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