Advertising is both an art and a science that entrepreneurs must master and understand its core fundamentals in order to maximize the rewards of advertising. Effective small business administration figures indicate that a successful small business must allocate 5% of the entrepreneur’s gross sales on advertising. However, this will only be beneficial if the entrepreneur understands the laws of advertising.Small business advertising laws:a) Pass one message at a timeTo see a high response rate, you must pass one message at a time. The message should be simple, compelling and needs to be quick. The message need only be five seconds long and can drive massive traffic to your site.b) Message conveyed must be credibleMany humans distrust advertising because over ages, advertisers have focused on misinforming the public, conveying lies and half-truths and data that is not credible. False advertising is a total waste of advertising money because even after managing to drive a customer to your site and you cannot deliver, there is no revenue gained. Place facts in your message and if the content is detailed, you may consider providing references.c) Always test everythingBefore diving to advertise your product, it is in the best interest of your business to test the advertisement to avoid wasting capital resources in advertising that may backfire. Since small businesses do not have much money to invest in advertising, planning and testing is crucial. You can carry out test advertisements to measure timing, headline and ad placement using special offers, code, coupons and direct customer contact. Another point to note is that you should test only one product at a time.d) Maintain easy contact with customersIn every advertisement, brochure, email, catalogue or company literature, ensure that you include the business contacts and any necessary information including email and website addresses, fax and phone numbers and physical address. This may sound simple but many businesses focus on the content and end up forgetting the vital contact part.e) Match every advertisement to the target audienceTo have a successful advertising campaign, your advertisement must focus on specific audience and be customized to speak to the target directly. This will make the audience have faith that the advertisement was crafted with them in mind and will have more drive to follow through with the message than a generalized advertisement that has no focus.f) Curiosity – make the customers want to know moreAffordable advertising does not seek to educate the customer about a product to the extent of making them choose whether to buy or not to buy it. Instead, it should provide basic concepts and inciting information to drive the target to want to know more about that business or product. It is wise to create ads that will make the prospective customers curious to want to know more about you and therefore come to get the specifics.If your advertisement does not pay back, never lay the blame on the advertising medium, it is the message. Always start small and fix advertising problems as you encounter them. A good advertising strategy demands research, planning, testing and constant improvement to succeed.
Category Archives: News
Online Classified Advertising – Better Substitute for Ordinary Advertising Methods
People use many advertising media such as television, radio, news paper and magazines. These are traditional advertising media people who use for decades. But at present business people are seeking for different kind of advertising media. As a better solution, internet advertising or online advertising is doing a great job.Now there are lots of online advertising websites available in the internet and people have the opportunity to publish their classified ads such as vehicles, electronic items, laptops, cameras, mobile phones as well as can advertise hotels, holiday resorts, spa, rent a car services, lands, houses, commercial buildings, apartments and many more.These online advertising websites work the same with other media and sometimes they provide more features than those ordinary sources.There are several advantages of online classified advertising. Mainly most of the barriers that affect to other media such as geographical and legal barriers will not affect to online promotions. Also advertisers can target huge potential customer by advertising online because your advertisement can be accessed from anywhere of the world.Another advantage of this is it can be published within a short time period and it can be done for lower cost than print or other media.Because of the advantages of online advertising, most of the news papers are also maintaining their online editions. Also most of the small & medium size enterprises advertise online because they have the opportunity to target wide range of customers for cheaper prices.Also in the near future, people will not have time to read newspapers or watch televisions for long time period because of their busy life style. Hence they will addict to the internet much more because it will help them to find what they need within a short time period even at their office or at bedroom.Another advantage of online classified advertising is it will allow to present ads with various audio and visual combination. As an example, if we take a paper advertisement, we can use only still images or visual contents and audio or animations cannot be used. These kinds of limitations are there in other promotional media as well. But in online advertising, we have the opportunity to use audio, visual and animating contents.Also there are time lags in other advertising media but online advertisement will be available in the internet during 24 hours a day for long time period.Likewise there are lots of advantages in online classified advertising and it will become the number one advertising option for business people in near future.
Mobile Location – Part 2 – What is Location-Based Advertising?
Mobile Location Based Advertising describes the provision of location-sensitive advertisements to mobile subscribers.For example, suppose a person carrying a Nokia N97 is close to a store that sells mobile telephone accessories. They might be offered 20% off the price of accessories for their N97, provided they purchase in the next 30 minutes. This example demonstrates the key virtue of location based mobile advertising: the offer can be made highly relevant to the subscriber, because they are in close proximity to the store. The example also shows how location information can be combined with other information (in this case the model of their mobile) in order to make the offer even more relevant.When discussing location based mobile advertising, one way to categorise the advertising is as Pull or Push:Pull AdvertisingThis occurs when a user has requested some information, and an advertisement that is relevant to the person’s location is presented together with the requested information. For example, if a user accesses an article on a release of a new Toyota model, an advertisement could be inserted for a motor dealer close to their current location.Pull advertising is not inherently intrusive, as the advertisement is just part of the normal stream that is being presented to the user. However, this lack of obtrusiveness also means that the advertisement may not be noticed.Push AdvertisingThis occurs when a person is presented with an unsolicited advertisement triggered based on their location. In the case of the N97 user described above, an SMS could be sent to them when they are close to the mobile phone store, offering them the 20% off the price of accessories. In this case, the advertisement is more likely to be noticed, but the consumer may react negatively to the intrusion.Push advertising is inherently more intrusive than Pull, but it could be far more effective than most forms of Pull. Many analysts anticipate that carefully targeted Push advertising inventory will attract significant premiums compared to mobile display inventory.Business ModelsCurrent business models for mobile location based Pull advertising tend to follow internet advertising models, with either Cost per Mille (CPM) or Cost per Click (CPC) fees.. The required accuracy for most mobile location based Pull advertising can be quite low. For example, often an advertiser may just want to target ads according to the city or state a subscriber is located in.There are far fewer commercial examples of mobile location based Push advertising in operation currently. Business models include CPM and CPA.AccuracyThe accuracy requirements for Push based advertising will often be more exacting than those for Pull advertisements. In order to justify the intrusion, the advertisement needs to be particularly relevant to the subscriber, so fine-grained localization is needed (e.g. the need to know when a subscriber is within easy walking distance of a store). Another requirement for Push based Advertising is that the underlying location technology needs to support geo-fencing. This is the capability to trigger an alert when a mobile enters or leaves a defined geographical region. Because reliable geo-fencing is difficult for NCID, this tends to favor handset and SIM based location.Subscriber PrivacyIn order for Mobile Location Based Advertising to be a success, it is important to take into account the privacy of the mobile subscriber. These concerns are likely to be even more important for Push than for Pull based advertising. In the case of Pull based advertising, the user may not even perceive that their location is being used to target the advertisement, but for Push, this will become obvious very quickly. In both cases, the best way to handle this issue is for the subscriber to opt in to receiving the localized advertising, and for the subscriber to have explicit control over their location information.