The main aim of advertising is to reach a large group of people and attract customers economically. Advertising when done correctly can bring about success in your business. The following are ten advertising tips that you have to pay attention to.
1. Know your target audience.
You must know your target audience towards which you have to gear your advertising campaign. You must refrain from making generic ads which most often fail to grab the attention of your potential customers.
2. Accentuate your competitive advantage.
You must know all about the pros of your company and accentuate all those factors that give you your competitive edge. It is a well known fact that although several ads are clever, they fail to sell the benefits of the service or product.
3. It pays to have an image.
The McDonald’s arches can be recognized by anybody while whizzing by on the highway. Similarly there are lots of other products which can be recognized through their packaging or logo. When it comes to promoting or advertising your business, the image counts a lot. Many advertisers do not take efforts to create a consistent image.
4. Spending money helps to make money.
Advertising is not the place where you can effectively work on a tight budget. It will affect the bottom line and also the sales. The fact is that advertising works despite its expensive nature. Hence the more money you spend on adverts, you can hope to increase your chances of improving your business.
5. Advertise in the appropriate places.
You must take care to advertise in the proper places such as radio station, favorite magazines or television program. For doing this effectively you must know what your audience read, watch, and listen to, and advertise in the proper place to reach your target market.
6. Your advertising campaign must not be determined by your budget.
Though it will be easy from a book keeping perspective to earmark some amount towards advertising expenses, it will not work out effectively always. If your business has seasonal highs and lows like plenty of other businesses, you may be spending lots of money during down times on advertising and not much when you really want to have customers. Many entrepreneurs fail to budget as per their seasonal advertising needs.
7. Diversify.
You must take care to spread your advertising money around and not put all eggs in the same basket. Many entrepreneurs select the best area to advertise based on potential rate of returns and price and then stop. This may not be the right thing to do.
8. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
Not every service or product will appeal to everyone. Many entrepreneurs including corporate executives try to devise ways and means to reach every market. This does not work. It can be disastrous for small businesses, who cannot afford to spread themselves too thin. Therefore, find your target audience or market and do everything possible for satisfying that group.
9. Check your ads in advance.
You must test your adverts on other people. You can do this by investing in focus groups if you have the time and money for investing in the same. You must try and find out if those people accept or understand the message you are trying to convey.
10. Monitor your ads.
You can easily find out from new clients or customers how they knew about you. Though this method seems to be simple not many entrepreneurs bother to do this. It is better to know which ads generate business.
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