Probably one of the most misunderstood areas of marketing and internet marketing.

Pick up the local paper today and throughout it you’ll see plenty of expensive advertisements from all kinds of companies in varying industries.

Many of these, including the larger supposedly more experienced companies will simply feature their web address in small print at the bottom of the ad.

The one major problem with this is the only visitors your likely to get are the ones that we call “Hot for what you’ve got”. This will be a very tiny portion of your “Target audience” and your target audience, in turn, is probably only a small fraction of the readership of the publication.

Instead of copying what “the big boys do” try to be more imaginative.

For example:-

Let’s say I own a dog boarding kennels and I’ve been running a basic ad in some kind of dog owner magazine.

Now assuming I’ve not had much space to work with and I want people who are going on holiday “THIS YEAR” not next week, to take action and enter my marketing funnel.

Rather than run an ad simply stating Dog Boarding with a contact number address and website address, hoping to get those at the last minute trying to sort out somewhere to put the family pets, I’d get far better results asking those who are going on holiday this year to visit my website to claim a free DVD or CD showing & explaining exactly how I care and look after their pets.

At the very least I should be asking them to visit the site to claim a free broucher along with a pre booking discount.

This way not only will I attract more potential customers to visit my site, by collecting their details in exchange for the information, I can continue to build a relationship with them until they’re ready to go on holiday.

TIP) You must compel reader to visit the site, there has to be something in it for them and you must clearly state it within the ad.

TIP) Change the URL for each publication so that you can monitor results eg:-

www.mysite.com/freebrochure for one advertisement
www.mysite.com/freedvd for another advertisement etc…

Try changing some of your existing ads and I’m sure you’ll see far better results.

Tags: , Advertising, Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.