Advertising Secrets
One of the advertising secrets the advertising industry wants to keep you in the dark about is… it's a bit of a scam.
In my experience over the past 15 years of more with small businesses, it usually works like this: the media and the advertising reps take money from you and… you get little or nothing in the way of results.
For some personal amusement, I recommend you ask the rep about some kind of guarantee of results and watch them splutter and bluster.
Why do they do this?
Because they are in the business of selling you advertising space and, often, "creative services", too.
That's the business they’re in: selling advertising. They'll tell you to use full (and expensive) colour to get attention, lots of whitespace to give clean design, and at least 6 insertions to get "brand awareness".
And it’s mostly nonsense – that’s one of the most powerful advertising secrets you’ll ever learn from me.
Because colour is almost always irrelevant (the best ads in history have been simple black-and-white ads that looked like editorial material), white and empty space cannot possibly sell anything, and, frankly, if your first run of an ad didn’t make you any money, then the only people benefiting from a further 5 runs are the people you are paying to run them!
Another one of the unpleasant advertising secrets they want to keep from you is advertising reps and agencies often get paid twice: they get paid by you to create the ad; and they get commission for the advertising space they’ve sold you.
So, with that all that in mind, you can see it’s going to serve you well to learn…
Three Essential Advertising Secrets To Increase Your ROI
1. The first of these advertising secrets is to test your advertising! Write the ad and run it as small and cheaply as you can. Don’t agree to more than one insertion upfront no matter how tempting the offer seems. If you can, get an option on running further ones at a discount if the first run is successful. Or, alternatively, get them to agree a cancellation with money-back if the first run doesn’t work. In this current economy especially, the negotiating power is all on your side, because advertising revenues for the media are dropping like a stone.
2. Secondly, write your ad using the AIDA formula – attention, interest, desire, action. First, get the reader’s attention with a compelling headline and not your logo or your company name. Make a big, bold, compelling promise to exactly the kind of people whom you want to be doing business with. The more specific you make your headline the better your responses will be. If you try to be all things to all men and women, you’ll end up being nothing to anyone.
3. Then get their interest by resonating with their problems and concerns. Fan the flames of their desire with a further promise of how you can fix it for them. Finally, get them to take action! Tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. Don’t leave it to them to work out for themselves when they feel the urge. You want them acting right now!
Above all I repeat: test!
Make sure you can track the responses to the ad to the ad itself.
For example. if you’re advertising in two local newspapers, use different website addresses or phone numbers, or even different names of people to ask for if they telephone: if the call is for "Mr Snodgrass" you know it was one paper; if it’s for "Ms Blenkinsopp", you know it was for the other.
Testing really is one of the most fundamental of the advertising secrets I can share with you. If you truly understand it and embrace it, it will not only make you a small fortune, but it’ll save you time, money and a lot of heartache, too.
Have a look around the rest of this site and see some of the specific advertising secrets and strategies you can use to increase your profits starting TODAY!
Happy Advertising!
Chris Cardell
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