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Business SMART: |
Guidelines to your Advertising Success |
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By:
Dennis A. Conforto
Chairman & CEO of A-Z Media Group, Inc. |
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Advertising is
without a doubt one of the trickiest things to master. If you
are going to be in retail or if you are a manufacturer
supporting retailers, mastering advertising is a must. I would
like to give you five guidelines that will contribute to your
advertising success. Next week, a follow-up article will provide
another five guidelines to help you master advertising.
One thing I have noticed about scrapbook retailers is that they
seem to put the brakes on when then should be stepping on the
gas. If volume goes down they advertise less not more. The less
they advertise the less volume they do. Those that advertise,
and I mean really advertise, do more volume during slow times
than those that don’t.
However, the real concern I have is when I review a scrapbooking
retailer’s ads and see that they have weak messages and that
campaigns lack the sparkle you would expect to see in a sales
event designed to drive real traffic to a store. This brings me
to the first of the ten guidelines you should be following to
achieve advertising success.
If your advertising isn’t working – STOP IT!
If you are running advertising that is not working, please stop
it! I know it sounds obvious but here’s what often happens:
People run advertising because they feel they ought to. They’re
not really sure if it’s working but they are hesitant to stop it
because it may be one of their main forms of marketing. If the
ads you are running aren’t producing great results, STOP,
re-evaluate and spend your marketing dollars elsewhere.
Understand how direct response advertising works!
There are two types of advertising – direct response advertising
and brand advertising. Understanding the distinction between the
two will immediately save you a fortune. Brand advertising is
used by companies like 3M to increase the awareness of their
brand. Unless you are getting co-op funds from your brands, you
should avoid brand advertising; for a small business it is a
complete waste of money. The best type of advertising to
consider is direct response advertising. The only purpose of
direct response advertising is to produce a clear response. The
type of response may vary depending on your overall marketing
strategy. You may want the response to be an immediate purchase.
You may want the response to be for someone to contact you to
sign up for a crop or class.
The great thing about direct response advertising is that you
can instantly tell whether it is working. It either produces a
response or it doesn’t. One of the reasons that most
scrapbooking advertising does not work is that it’s a
combination of half hearted direct response and highly
ineffective trade brand advertising. Fortunately, you now know
the difference. In the land of independent retailers, direct
response is king!
Testing and measuring is a must!
It is absolutely essential that you test and measure all of your
advertising. If you are going to engage in direct response
advertising you obviously need to be able to measure that
response, otherwise you are not going to know if the ad is
working.
At the very least, you need to know how many people responded,
how many of them were converted to a sale and what that is worth
to you. Then you need to compare that figure to the cost of the
ad (which should be on average 5%) and you can immediately work
out how profitable the ad was, or whether you should stop
running it.
Many retailers allocate a certain amount of money to an
advertising budget, spend the money every year and only have a
vague sense of whether the ads are working or not. This is
harmful to your business. If your ads are working, you want to
roll them out on a larger scale. If they’re not, STOP and use
the money on one of the dozens of other marketing strategies
that can bring you a greater return on your investment.
You will obviously need a system for asking your consumers who
enter your store for the first time where they heard about you.
If you’re directing people to a website, you may want to set up
a special web page that also only appears in your ad. This will
ensure that you can clearly identify when people are responding
to your advertising.
Your headline is the most important part of your ad!
In the ad itself the most important element is the headline. The
headline is either the heading that goes at the top of the ad or
if there’s no heading, it’s the first words of the ad text. The
headline needs to grab peoples’ attention. One change in a
headline can produce a 50-100% increase in response.
One of the biggest challenges that any advertiser faces is
getting people to read their ad – let alone for the ad to
produce a result. So the main purpose of the headline is not to
sell your product – it’s just to get people to read your ad.
The headline should be about your readers – not about you. If
your headline has the name of your business in it, you are
probably losing response. Imagine you owned a company selling
fire alarms. Which of these headlines do you think would be most
likely to get the reader’s attention:
Conforto’s Fire Alarms - Your Guarantee of Safety
OR
Is your Family's Life worth the price of a soft drink?
Be adventurous with your headlines. Test different versions to
see what works best. There are no rules except what works.
Remember the advertising rule known as AIDA!
There’s a classic formula used by advertisers and it is worth
remembering. The formula is AIDA. This stands for:
Attention – The first thing your ad needs to do is grab the
reader’s attention. You achieve this with your headline.
Interest – Once you’ve gotten their attention, you need to
create an interest in your product or service.
Desire – There is a big difference between being interested in a
product or service and desiring it. You need to convert the
reader’s interest into a strong desire for what you are
offering.
Action - Even if someone desires what you have, it is not enough
until they take action. At the end of the ad you need a call to
action. Tell people exactly what they need to do to follow
through, AND make it easy for them to do so.
If you follow this formula in every ad that you write, you will
greatly increase your chances of success.
Now you have five of the ten guidelines for improving your
advertising success. Remember, however, like all guidelines
there are exceptions; when it comes to adverting one has to
always be thinking. That is what being business SMART is all
about. |
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