John Wannamaker, founder of the east coast Wannamaker’s Department Stores, is credited with having once observed, “I know I waste half the money I spend on advertising, the problem is figuring out which half.”
This is an insight that is often lost on inexperienced marketers, particularly new businesses.
Wannamaker understood that for a variety of reasons only half of those who were seeing his ads were customers or potential customers for his store, and that he was wasting his money advertising to the half that were not. The irony of Wannamaker’s observation is that it was made more than 100 years ago, when his media choices were a tiny fraction of what they are today — maybe he had the local newspaper, some billboards and perhaps handout fliers to choose among, but certainly there was no TV, cable, radio, the Internet, bus signs, logo wear…
Wannamaker clearly understood he needed to target his marketing efforts specifically at those people who were or were likely to become customers. Like Wannamaker, as a marketer you need to know your customers or potential customers because if you don’t know who they are, then you could very possibly waste half or more of your promotional dollars on media that will charge you lots of money for viewers / readers who are not and likely will never be your customers.
Here’s an extreme, but true, example of someone’s misguided media buy: I once heard a high-end jewelry store advertising their pricey crystal glassware on a hard rock station. Yes, the station was the number one in the market, but that “number one” included a great many young people (high school age and below) who were certainly not in the market for expensive glassware.
As a small business can you afford to throw away half of your marketing budget like this?…
Getting Some Advertising Ideas Out of the Idea Cafe
Networking is one of the most important things that you do for your business. It helps keep your head on straight and being able to talk with other business owners about what they are doing to increase employee retention or build on their current business structure can really help you through the tough times can provide you with the information that you need to help further your business venture and improve your business marketing.
There are usually groups in the community that you can join. They generally have meetings and get together to discuss business. For many business owners this is hard to do because they work so much they can’t get away often. There is now an excellent place online that you can tap into without leaving the office or even from home.
This new idea, The Idea Cafe, is such an invaluable resource, and such a simple way to get info on things that are really important. It is so good that it was noticed by the Wall Street Journal. You will be able to ask questions about anything at all business related. And you will then get answers from people that have experience far greater than yours.
They can help you choose the best promotional merchandise to use for your business and then give you some ideas about how you can market with them. There are tons of different things that you might want to ask about. How you can best move your business to a new location and still retain customers is one. You might want to learn what others have done when getting a space at a trade show too.
The Idea Cafe offers a resource that is invaluable to small business owners around the world. It is a gathering place that provides information and allows for a free exchange of ideas to help you succeed in your current business venture. You can chat with others in your area of interest or any business owner to get answers to the questions you have about different aspects of running your business and making it as successful as possible. Business networking has never been simpler than with the Idea Cafe, a place that allows you access to those business owners who have the answers you need.…
Using Television Advertising To Your Advantage
If you want to see your business survive, you need a powerful marketing strategy. Anything that you can do to effectively promote your products and services are a good step in the right direction. Now notice that I said “promote your products and services” as opposed to “promote your business”. There’s a distinct difference between the 2, and I want to share with you some of these differences.
When you promote your business, you’re relying on a form of brand advertising. With brand advertising, you’re wasting thousands of dollars trying to convince the public that you’re a major corporation. But you should know that it’s not about convince people that you’re a big company. What it all boils down to is whether or not you can compel your prospects to become a new customer.
When you promote your products and services, you take an entirely different approach to marketing your business. Instead of focusing on your brand and what you stand for, you’re going at the precise problem that your prospects are having. This is known as “target marketing”, and it’s something that you will want to learn how to do if you want to have success in your business.
With target marketing, you’re taking a direct path towards selling to an individual prospect. What this means is that you’ll spend less money marketing, and spend more time on those prospects who are ready and willing to do business with you. Target marketing is something that I recommend, and it’s something that you should start doing today.
Now that we’ve covered “target marketing”, let’s take a look at a technique that is sure to put you in the “profitable” category. Here’s the technique:
– Television advertising
If you are going to do television advertising, then you should really start to learn about direct marketing. You see you can’t make your entire TV ad all about building your brand. You have only about 30 seconds to make your pitch, and to get people to order from you right away.
TV advertising on a national scale can become quite expensive, so it’s best if you stick to local area advertising only. For some franchise businesses, they don’t have to worry about TV advertising because headquarters run these ads for them automatically. But since you’re a “little guy”, you will more than likely want to stick with direct response advertising.
In your TV ad, make sure your website and phone number are obviously displayed. You don’t have that much time to get your message across. You have to imagine your visitor with the remote in their hand, ready to click to another channel. It’s your job to make these visitors stay on your TV ad, so that you can convince them on taking action on your free offer of some sort.
And by the way, when running television ads, attempt to generate a lead. This way you’ll build yourself up a nice list of people that you can market to over and over …
Television Advertising Made Simple
If you want to make more money in your business, one great way of doing it is with television advertising. TV advertising is something that a lot of business owners attempt to do, but only a few of them have success with it. If you would like to propel and take your business to the next level, then I think TV advertising would be in your best interest.
Why do I recommend TV advertising? Well simply because it works. There are all kinds of business owners in my city who are using TV to promote their products and services. And they do have a special technique for making it work for them. It’s all within the marketing approach when they come across your ad.
You see television advertising is merely regular advertising – but it’s just on TV, and not in print. So you should practice the same principles of direct response marketing when putting your pitch on the TV screen. Direct response simply means that instead of brand advertising and “getting your name out there”, you’re holding your advertising accountable and are testing and tracking your results.
But before you run your first ad on TV, you should do your homework. Find out which competitors have run TV ads in the past, and who are running these ads now. You want to see which business owners are still running their TV ads, because more than likely, if they’re running it for a long time, more than likely it’s being successful for them. So this is something that you will want to look at.
Once you’ve determined which advertisers in your niche are having success with their TV advertising, you want to emulate the successful parts of their ad. This means that you should find the best points about their ads as possible, all while making your ad unique. This is a classic form of doing your homework.
So what should you say in your television ad? Well you want to have a strong introduction, a strong story or sales message, and a powerful close. Your goal is to keep your viewers “locked in” to what they are saying, and to prevent them from turning the channel on you.
One thing that you will want to make sure of is to offer more than one mode of response. Include your website address, phone number, and fax, and even mailing address. You never know which way your prospect wants to respond to you. So offer more than one way to contact you.
Television advertising is everywhere nowadays. They’re 30-second to 1-minute ads in the day time, and then 30-minute infomercials that come on late at night. You should make it a point to study these ads and see what makes them so successful.
If you can follow out this plan, your chances of business success will put you on top of the pile. Trust me, I would know. I’ve seen tons and tons of people have success with television advertising, and …
Internet Marketing – Paying For Advertising
Are you currently advertising your website online? I mean paid advertising. Are you using paid advertising to drive traffic to your site and to get more new sales? If so, then hopefully you are getting good results from your efforts. While advertising is excellent, not all forms of paid advertising are created equal.
There are some forms of paid advertising that is effective, and some that are just flat out not good. Even if you’re advertising right now to get traffic (and NOT targeted traffic… I’m talking about traffic that makes it look like you’re succeeding online)… you have to make sure that you are getting sales and seeing results from your advertising efforts.
One form of paid advertising that I like to invest in is pay per click advertising (PPC). With pay per click, you bid on certain keywords that you would like to rank high for in the “sponsored listings” section of the search engines. Depending on your niche, you could either spend a lot on some keyword phrases, or you can pay a little.
Nevertheless, pay per click advertising can be a great way to bring new sales to your website. The top players in the pay per click game are Google AdWords, and Bing Ads (Yahoo and Bing combined). Despite the combination of Bing Ads, Google AdWords is still larger… by a lot.
But the traffic from Bing Ads is still good. You will want to monitor your costs and make sure that you’re actually turning a profit or getting a lot of leads from your advertising efforts. If it helps, you may find it beneficial to start off with a low pay per click bid (around 10 cents), and monitor your results from there.
Pay per click advertising is a very addictive thing to use. You will find yourself tweaking things here and there, changing your landing page, deleting keywords, creating new ads, and etc. The bottom is that, if after 2 changes your results haven’t picked up, it’s time to let the campaign go, and move into a different niche.
Even though PPC is good, you don’t want to bet the farm on something that is untested. Make sure your product price point is good so that you can make up for any money loss when acquiring the customer. Also, make sure to make the decision as to whether or not go hard and spend more on PPC – despite going negative on the initial sale, or slow things up a big to just break even or make a small profit on each sale.
I like PPC, but it isn’t the only good form of advertising online. I also like to do ezine advertising. This is the process of contacting ezine and email list owners and seeing if you can buy an advertising slot in their publication. This works very well, and there are a ton of ezine and email list owners who will take you up on your offer.
You can find ezines …
Television (TV) Advertising To Reach More People
Marketing can take upon a whole variety of forms. You can do it on the internet, magazines, newspapers, and even joint ventures. This is something that you should look into if you want to improve your sales and profits. But unfortunately, a lot of the marketing methods that you think would work now is slowly because a technique that is futile in nature.
But there is one kind of advertising that people are looking into as another form of marketing. This form is television advertising. Depending on where you run your television ad, it can really cost you a lot of money. But if you’re in a local area and want to run your TV ad locally, it won’t cost as much.
When running TV ads, you have to follow the same conventions of direct response marketing. Lead with a big headline, show the viewer what’s in it for them; and have a strong close with your phone number and website address. Now if this sounds simple, it is, but there’s one thing that you need to do to: you have to get them to put the remote down.
Getting viewers to do such a thing is tough. Most of them are just flipping through the channels looking for something watch, and can care less about the ads that we see on TV. But for that 1 scanning viewer, you will want to capture their attention with a riveting headline that will get them to start taking your TV ad seriously.
You have all kinds of elements that you have to be aware of when thinking about running a TV ad. You need testimonials, before and after pictures, a good pitch person, the ultimate benefit, and much more. Using these strategies, you’ll be able to have the foundations of a good TV ad.
Now obviously your offer will want to be good also. No matter what you sell, price it from $10 – $30, and then when they buy, try to upsell them immediately with your $2000 product. This is how the pros do it. Even if you don’t have a $2000 product, if you have a product that is high priced and relates to the item that they just bought, consider selling them that.
A good television ad can bring you a lot of new customers overnight. I can remember a pawn shop offering PlayStation 2’s for $100. I saw the ad at around 3am in the morning, and told myself I would go down there to buy one. But when I got there, they were all sold out!
Needless to say I was upset, but this brings on a simple marketing strategy that I think you can learn from.
If that ad was shown in the newspaper, I thought that it would have been sold out overnight. But since it was on TV broadcasting to the masses, I think this is the factor that made the campaign a success.
Before you rule out TV advertising, think about the …