Advertising Basics for Business 2

Reprinted with permission from Janet Attard* Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.
     
Why does paid advertising work for some businesses and not for others?

Advertising is not an exact science. Response to advertising is affected by the words and pictures used in an ad, the location of an ad in a publication, and the business owner's skill at choosing the right media. The weather, the time of year, what's on a page next to an ad, or what comes on before or after a commercial on TV or radio all can have an effect on advertising response rates, too. Thus, to some extent, finding what works and what doesn't is a matter of trial and error for every business.

Advertising is expensive. Is there any way to avoid wasting a lot of money on ads that don't work?

There is no way to completely avoid advertising mistakes and no way to ensure that every ad you place will be a success. In fact, some may not bring in enough responses to pay for themselves.
You can minimize the risk of costly error, however, if you remember these seven secrets of successful homebased and small business advertisers:

1. Know the purpose of your ad.
2. Set a budget.
3. Make realistic estimates of the number of responses you will get to ads.
4. Know how many responses you will need to break even on your advertising costs.
5. Choose a target market and then put your ad in media aimed at that market.
6. Test on a small scale before launching an expensive large-scale ad campaign.
7. Expand the number and/or size of ads little by little, building on your successes, learning from the mistakes.

Isn't the purpose of all ads to sell?

Yes, but different ads sell in different ways. Advertising can be used to sell in any one of these four ways:

• Build name recognition (so the customer remembers the product or service and looks for it in the future when the need arises),
  
• Get inquiries that are followed up by sales calls or by sending sales literature.
  
• Sell products directly by getting people to call or send away for a product.
  
• Get customers to come to a shop or restaurant.
  Generally, the more expensive a product or the smaller the ad the less likely it is that customers will buy directly from an ad. If you want to sell a product directly from an ad, you will need one that's large enough to give the prospective customer enough details to make a purchase decision. If you can only afford small ads, you will need to have sales literature made up to hand out to people who ask about your product or service.

How do you target ads to specific markets?

Different media appeal to different types of people for different reasons. Putting the ad where a lot of people will see it isn't necessarily as important as putting it where the right kind of people will see it. Place your ad where people who have a known interest or need in the type of product or service you sell will find the ad and respond to it.

For instance, an ad for candle-making supplies is likely to draw far more responses in Crafts magazine than it is in Computer Shopper. Although people who use computers might also make candles, they would never look in a computer magazine to find out about candle-making supplies. Similarly, while someone who makes candles or designs patterns may well use a computer, they aren't going to look for ads for drawing software or computer clip art in Crafts magazine.  

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