Tip of the Week

Business SMART:	More Guidelines to your Advertising Success
	By: Dennis A. Conforto Chairman & CEO of A-Z Media Group, Inc.

Last week we discussed the first half of our list of 10 guidelines to contribute to your advertising success. To review, the first five guidelines are: If your advertising isn’t working – STOP IT! Understand how direct response advertising works. Testing and Measuring are a must. Your headline is the most important part of your ad! Remember the advertising rule known as AIDA. This week we’ll discuss the final five guidelines for advertising success. Benefits, benefits, benefits! One of the principles that should drive all of your marketing campaigns is communicating the benefits of your product or service. The copy of your ad needs to be a personal communication to the individual reading it and it needs to be about them. The ad needs to address their needs, desires and fears and it needs to constantly communicate the benefits of what you are offering. Nobody will buy anything from you until they have first understood how they will benefit from what you have to offer. Here’s a useful tip: When you’ve written your ad, imagine stepping into the shoes of your prospective customer. From this perspective does the ad fully convey what the benefits are? If not, go back and fine tune the ad until it feels right. Don’t advertise on a left hand page! This one piece of knowledge can turn an unsuccessful ad campaign into a successful one. This has been tested again and again. When you read a publication, your eyes are drawn to the right hand page as you flip through. Statistically, more people will see your ad if it’s on the right hand page. If you look at the big national magazines and newspapers, you will see that most of the large advertisers are on the right hand pages. The few that appear on the left hand pages will be paying less because their advertising agencies know that fewer people will see the ad. When you book your ad space, tell them you want it on a right hand page. Very few people in your position ask for this, so the publication will normally oblige. If they tell you they can’t guarantee it – tell them you’ll advertise in a future edition when they can guarantee it. You’ll soon discover how accommodating they can be! Never pay the full rate for advertising! Apart from knowing that you want your ad on a right hand page, the person selling you the advertising needs to know very early on that you have absolutely no intention of paying the full rate. Most advertising rate cards list prices that are far too high and you can always negotiate to a more appealing rate. If you’re a small business, remember that large companies who use ad agencies are buying based on the readership or audience levels rather than the rate card - so haggle and negotiate. If you can pay 15 to 20% less for your ads you can turn an unprofitable ad into a successful one. Here’s another handy little trick to pay less for your advertising. The closer to the deadline you can book your ad, the better. Sales teams work towards targets and as the deadline approaches they get more desperate to fill the ad space. They become far more open to negotiation. Don’t follow the competition! One of the biggest mistakes people make is advertising in publications just because their competitors are in them. Don’t for a minute think that all your competitors are there because their ads are producing great results. They’re more likely to be there because everyone else is, and most of them won’t have a clue whether their ads are working or not. In fact, this is a well-known sales trick used by the people selling ad space. If they can get one or two of your competitors to advertise, they can call you up and tell you how you’ll lose out if you don’t advertise too. What they fail to mention is that your competitors probably never test their advertising, often haven’t got a clue how to market and are only advertising because they think you will. This is a highly effective way to sustain the advertising industry. It’s not a great way for you to run your business. Don’t buy into the myth that advertising is your only marketing tool for your business success! Advertising is just one of many marketing options that you have and you really shouldn’t be dependent on it. Start to think outside of the box. Ideally, you should be using a combination of other marketing strategies to grow you business. These include, but are not limited to: Telephone Marketing Direct Mail Internet Email marketing Direct Sales Public Relations Strategic Alliances Lead Response Marketing A multi-level Referral system Take a good look at this list. How many of these strategies are you implementing in your scrapbooking store? More importantly, what would happen to your business if you could start to combine some of these extra marketing approaches? How would that affect your profits? Here’s another thought: At least four of the items on this list will cost you either nothing or very little to implement; some of the best marketing is free! Every one of these marketing tools is found within the scrapbooking industry today. When you think outside the box the rewards can be great and that is what being business SMART is all about.