Entries Tagged 'Advertising' ↓
May 31st, 2008 — Advertising, Business marketing, Business productivity, Consumer Behavior
How inundated are we with advertising these days? So much so that we tune most of it out. This is especially true in today’s digital age, where we are able to TiVo through ads on television or surf past them on the Internet. With this, it makes it more challenging for small business owners out there to come up with advertisements that will be eye-catching enough for your target audience to PAY ATTENTION to it.
Unlike giant behemoths like the CBS Television Network, small businesses have limited budgets and restricted resources. Our marketing, by necessity, is usually much more focused than that of our bigger business brethren. No, we don’t have million-dollar budgets or a gaggle of high-priced, well-educated marketing whizzes coming up with clever ideas for us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow a good idea of theirs when we see one … and I see one. Take a simple idea and make it in such a way that will capture your audiences’ attention
CBS has been collaborating with EggFusion, a company which (well, you can guess by now) uses the egg as a concept for creative advertising and marketing. Besides advertisers, they also reach out to other areas such as producers, retailers and consumers. Now that is what I call being an all-rounder!
No, you may not have a budget that allows you to imprint millions of eggs with your company logo, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be clever. In fact, I would wager that it is your entrepreneurial cleverness that sets you apart. After all, you would not step into the tricky and risky world of business if you weren’t a smarty pants 
Use it. Come up with a new idea and run with it. Be different, be remarkable. Do the UNEGGSPECTED
May 12th, 2008 — Advertising, Business marketing, Consumer Behavior
If you want your advertising to “stick” with prospective customers, it’s essential that you appeal to their emotions in some way. I’m sure you’ve had experiences in which you’ve watch an out-of-this-world commercial on TV (be it silly but hilarious like Jack in the Box, or simply breathtakingly eye catching like the Chanel No. 5 commercial where Nicole Kidman and Baz teamed up to do a Moulin Rouge style ad). Fail to do this and you might as well be throwing money out the window.
Effective ads sell your message, company, or product. They may or may not be creative, but if you can package some good creative in with a message that appeals to a strong need or want within your target audience, it will certainly help. Like a broken recorder, I emphasize on research, research, and…….research
Effective ads are convincing. They engage potential customers as if you were speaking directly to them, and when you succeed in making this connection your prospective customer’s thoughts will become your brand itself. So the rule of thumb is that you ‘speak’ to them, to their emotions, to the core of their being.
Even if you achieve the enviable position of having a provocative ad execution with an effective message, your work is far from over. In fact, in the world of advertising, your work is never over!
Continually exposing your customers, prospective customers, and suspects (those who aren’t currently interested in your company or product, but who might be shortly) to the same messaging over a prolonged period of time will lead to stagnation. Eventually, you’ll fail not only to inspire brand loyalty, but also to retain it. Even Coke, one of the world’s most valuable brands, reinvents its messaging and image when it decides they have begun to lose effectiveness. It is human nature to get bored after being exposed repeatedly to the same old advertisement or message. In psychology language, we call this ‘repeated exposure’. Thus, change and adaptation is an essential ingredient to maintaining customers’ loyalty to your brand and services.
Creating an Effective Ad Campaign
So how do you create an effective ad campaign? One way is to go with the single benefit methodology, which directly links your brand to a single benefit. If your deodorant lasts longer, tell the world about it. The characterization or personification angle involves creating a character that expresses the product’s benefits or personality. The narrative methodology involves developing a narrative story with episodes describing a problem and its outcome.
Again, aim to produce advertising that states not only a product’s facts, but that also appeals to emotions. Using the deodorant example, you might accomplish this by playing off your customers’ fears of having body odor at an inopportune time. Your ad must make your audience feel like the MUST have it and that they cannot live without it.
Although a calculated and well thought out advertising campaign may do a good job of creating brand awareness, it may fall short of inducing product preference or, the end goal, purchase. Whatever it may be, don’t give up and treat the customers you have well. As the saying goes, a good deed goes a longgggg way….and you never know, the power of word of mouth as a form of advertisement can be pretty effective too!
May 4th, 2008 — Advertising, Business Startup, Business marketing, Business productivity, Consumer Behavior
We all know that advertising is like air to our lungs. We NEED it to survive. Same goes for our business…but there’s a difference between good advertising and bad advertising, which you should know by now, has its consequences.
If you hate reading long, wordy stuff….let me give you the shortcut:
Business + Good advertising = $$$$$$$$$
Typically, advertising and promotion are vital to the success of a business. To successfully advertise you will need to allocate a portion of your budget for such purposes. The size of this percentage will depend on the size of your business and the scope of the market that you are trying to reach. Proportionally, a small business and a multimillion-dollar corporation may spend the same percentage of their budget on advertising. If the advertising campaign is carefully planned to reach the target audience, the resulting increase in business may also be a similar percentage. For example a few well-placed billboards in a small town might generate a 10 percent increase in sales for a small business while a national commercial might produce the same 10 percent increase for a major retail chain. Therefore, do some serious research and budgeting to ensure that the money you allocate does not go to waste.
Your focus, when advertising, needs to be on:
- The type of media to reach most effectively your target audience
- The type of advertising campaign you will run, e.g. to promote a new product, to place a familiar product or company name in front of the audience, or to promote a special service or activity
- The advertising style that best suits your products and/or services
- How can you reach the most people (within your defined market) for your advertising dollar
Again, my suggestion is that you do some research like handing out questionnaires to your targeted audience. Also ensure that your sample is randomized so that your results will less biased.
When you advertise, you are investing in your own business, and, as with any type of investment, there are risks involved. The major risk is that the advertisements will not generate enough sales to justify the costs of the campaign. As is the case with any investment, through due diligence you will determine the most appropriate and secure means of advertising before taking such risks.
You could write down a list of ways to advertise and list the pros and cons of each type of advertising. For example, advertisement on the web, billboard, magazines, TV, Radio, etc. With that you can hopefully see which type of advertising will give you the most benefits with the least risk.
In a nutshell, do your research, draw up a list of ways to advertise, take a deep breath (just to make it sound dramatic) and make your decision. A calculated risk it is but hey, if you have the guts to start your own business, choosing how you want to advertise your business should be a piece of cake!
April 20th, 2008 — Advertising, SEO
Keywords are the in thing as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goes these days. It’s important that to keep in mind when you create a fantastic write up about your company. Three to four key words should do the trick. The trick is to place those words strategically in the first paragraph when you write so the ‘crawlies’ (search engine spiders) will pick it up and chances of your website getting spotted on search engines goes up!
For example, if I were to do a write up about 2LevelsAbove, I would use three keywords – 2LevelsAbove, Search Engine Optimization and startup business. I will then write in a way that would place these words in the first few lines of the first paragraph….something like this:
2LevelsAbove is a company dedicated in helping startup businesses gain popularity in the virtual world using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and creating a fantastic web site for our clients.
If you only have one of the top 10 spots in Google searches for important key words - here are some ways get more visibility there.
Here are three places that will let you (responsibly) publish information with links to your site. The new thing you write ranks well quickly because it is on existing sites that have great ranking.
- answers.yahoo.com - Strategically creating good questions and answers will get ranked well on search engines and generate traffic to your website or blog. Use the tool and do not always promote something, or the same thing.
- Squidoo.com - Publish your lens with resources and outbound links. Be sure to use the keywords you are targetting in your tags and titles.
- HubPages.com - Freakishly fast and high ranking in Google after publishing on this. Build HubPages on your targeted topic and be sure to include a few links to what you are promoting.
In all three of these cases, you have to add value. If you just post blatant promotional items, it will get far fewer results (and possibly removed.). So be a little smart and post something intellectual
March 25th, 2008 — Advertising, SEO
The Dallas Business Journal recently ran a story on , Wasp Barcode Technologies, describing how they went from spending enormous amounts of money on PPC to focusing more on traditional SEO and link building. The strategy paid off — Wasp spent less and got better results. These are the kind of results every small to medium sized business would like to enjoy.
Wasp cut its external spending by 13% and reinvested the funds into in-house personnel, who “re-architected” the site so users would find it easier to use and more relevant. Those steps meant optimizing the site for specific key words such as “asset tracking” and “inventory control” and continuing to add richer online content, including slide show presentations, Webinars and YouTube demos. This strategy also including increasing the link popularity of the site by both natural and aggressive means.
The efforts are paying off in a multitude of ways. In 2007, the company’s Web hits grew by 60%, topping 600,000 visits. “The added visibility makes the company appear large and established, and bodes well with resellers such as Fry’s and Staples who rely on brand awareness to sell Wasp’s products,” Wasp President Steve Coffman said. “It also helps Wasp reach small businesses, which often turn to the Web for technology guidance.”
While a PPC campaign can deliver traffic with relative ease, it can be very costly and has no real longevity — once you stop shelling out the cash, the traffic goes away. SEO and link building require a lot more creative effort but can have more sustainable results. It also allows a business to target a larger base of users as most studies reveal that 75 - 80% of searchers click on organic listings as opposed to paid listings.
Wasp learned this after spending considerable funds on Google AdWords and other PPC programs. That is not to say that they did not learn from the PPC experience. They most likely were able to gather intelligence on specific terms searchers were looking for related to their products. They also very likely learned how to improve conversions for each keyword search they attracted.
So the lesson to learn here is to lay your foundation with SEO, link building and maybe even some social media marketing. If you have additional budget, incorporate the PPC as well. However, don’t overlook the potential that a strategic SEO and link building campaign has to offer in your web marketing efforts.
March 24th, 2008 — Advertising, SEO
March 24th, 2008 — Advertising, SEO
Very important thing when designing a site is to make sure we make the site navigation as friendly as possible, we have to make the site with the best navigation for the crawlers to dip deep into the site, If your Web pages are not accessible to a spider, no amount of content optimisation, Website popularity or submitting to search engines will improve their performance — they simply won’t be added to the index.
Some the stuff search engines find difficult to crawl is flash, DHTML, Javascript etc, Make sure you use all these things to the minimum level on the site.
February 21st, 2008 — Advertising, General Knowledge
Do search engines sell listings? Yes. Should searchers fear this? Not necessarily. Paid listings generate revenue for search engines, which in turn helps them provide unpaid editorial listings to searchers for free.
Think newspapers. Newspapers have both “editorial” copy, which is not supposed to be influenced by advertising, as well as ads themselves. You may read the paper primarily for the articles, but there are certainly times when you may find the advertisements useful, as well.
How do you know what’s an ad? In “old” media such as newspapers and television, most people can readily identify ads because they look or act so very different from “content.” Over time, most people pick up on cues that identify whether something is an ad or not. Occasionally, “infomercials” or “advertorials” cut very close to mimicking content. That’s why these forms of advertisements often have to carry disclaimers, to ensure consumers are not misled.
In the new media of search engines, paid listings have been commonplace since 2001. By now, most people know what a paid search ad looks like in the SERPs. However, that wasn’t always the case. Back in 2004, the situation was complicated due to the fact that most search engines didn’t distinguish between editorial and paid search results.
The search engine advertising chart below can help you understand the main forms of ads you may encounter on various popular search engines. This is helpful for searchers who want to be more educated about what they view, as well as for potential advertisers who would like to be listed with search engines.
Types Of Ads / Chart Key
All search engines have some editorial-style listings that are not bought and sold. Ad spend will not guarantee a top ranking in these places. However, the space around this editorial copy is considered fair game for ads. So, what’s available?
Paid Placement Listings
Most major search engines carry paid placement listings, where advertisers are guaranteed a high ranking, usually in relation to desired words. These paid listings are usually segregated from editorial results and labeled to highlight that they are ads. The exact position of the paid placement listings can vary. Usually, they appear above the editorial links. They can also appear at the bottom or to the side of editorial content in “Sidebar” style.
Search Engine Watch generally uses the term “paid placement” to describe ads that guarantee placement, but others may refer to these ads in different terms, including “sponsored listings,” “paid search ads,” “pay for placement,” “pay for performance,” “CPC listings” (cost-per-click) and “PPC listings” (pay per click). The last two terms reflect the fact that paid listings are sold on a basis where advertisers only pay if someone clicks on their ads.
Advertisers looking for a basic guide to purchasing paid listings should see the Submitting Via Paid Listings page. Anyone interested in articles that examine various issues associated with paid listings should see the compilation of articles on the Search Engine Advertising page’s Paid Placement section.
Paid Inclusion
In paid inclusion, a site owner pays a fee in order to have web pages included in a search engine’s editorial listings. Does this mean that those in paid inclusion get to be ranked tops in editorial results? No. The major search engines offering such programs are usually emphatic that payment does not provide any ranking boost.
For example, someone with a brand new web site might submit their home page through a paid inclusion program in order to ensure that the page gets listed within a day or two, rather than the typical two-to-four weeks it might take for a crawler-based search engine to find the page “naturally.” Whether the site will rank well for a particular term will remain dependent on the various factors that search engines use to ordinarily rank web pages (described more on the How Search Engines Rank Web Pages and Search Engine Placement Tips page).
In another example, someone might have a page that changes often, such as with new products for sale. Paid inclusion would allow this page to be revisited on a regular basis, such as every other day, rather than the more common monthly schedule that most crawler-based search engines tend to follow.
How about one more example? Even the best crawler-based search engines do not gather all the pages that a web site may publish. Some pages may be difficult to index because they are dynamic in nature. Others pages may be missed simply because a search engine can’t get to everything out there. With paid inclusion, a content publisher can ensure that all their pages are included if they are willing to foot the bill. Paying still doesn’t guarantee placement, but being more deeply listed can improve the likelihood of an advertiser appearing in response to a wide range of searches.
It is important to remember that paid inclusion provides no boosts in ranking. While paid inclusion was popular for a while, currently there are not many paid inclusion programs left.
Advertisers looking for a basic guide to purchasing paid inclusion should see the Submitting To Crawlers page. Anyone interested in articles that examine various issues associated with paid inclusion should see the compilation of articles on the Search Engine Advertising page’s Paid Inclusion section.
Below are some key articles from that page on the subject from Search Engine Watch:
Paid Submission
Only Yahoo still operates a paid submission program. More about this can be found on the Submitting To Directories page, while past articles about issues with paid submission can be found on the Search Engine Advertising page’s Paid Submission section.
Content Promotion
Many major search engines will promote an advertiser’s content or their own content on their search results pages. This is usually done in a separate area from the editorial results.
Banner Ads
Many major search engines have for years carried keyword-linked, graphical banner advertising. The chart below does not list who does or where these ads appear, as such ads are readily identifiable.
Search Engine Paid Content Disclosure
While paid search ads are more readily identified in search engine results today, back in 2002, search ads were not always clearly identified, resulting in a controversy over disclosure. Then in June 2002, the US Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines about how search engines should disclosure paid content, as explained more in the FTC Recommends Disclosure To Search Engines article from Search Engine Watch.
The level of disclosure surrounding paid placement ads varies by search engine. Over the years, watchdog groups have tried to raise awareness of the need for advertising disclosure on search engines, and perhaps today, more people are aware of the distinction between organic and paid listings. However, research on public awareness shows that typical web searchers generally do not recognize the distinction between organic and paid search listings.
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