How to Target Your Advertisement

Many believe that advertising and marketing are the same, but that is a misconception. Advertising is a component of marketing. Marketing is the process of determining the best method to meet target customers’ needs. Advertising is promoting the actual products or services. Advertising can turn out to be the fastest way to waste money on your marketing. Here’s how to target your advertisement.

To start, I need to tell you that advertising is not the best way to market your business effectively; there are many better ways to market. Advertising may be the most popular method, but far too many people stop there. Since advertising is often the most expensive marketing option, it’s not surprising that many businesses get bogged down over marketing. Wouldn’t it be great if there were other, more cost-effective ways to market your business? There are direct mail, e-commerce, telephone, email, and many other ways; I’ll get to them later. Now, if you are currently advertising, here are some important do’s and don’ts.

1. Stop any current advertisements that isn’t working.

Although it may seem obvious, many businesses keep advertising in the same places year after year, whether they know it’s working for them or not!

2. Measure whether your advertisements are working

Far too many businesses use up their advertising budget every year without testing to see what works for them. This doesn’t make sense! If something is working, then yes, you want to keep running it and perhaps expand that particular advertisement further and spend more on it. However, if something isn’t working, you need to stop running it and allocate the money you would have used to other marketing methods, which have a higher chance of success.

3. Work on ‘Direct Response’ advertisement

There is a lot of talk about ‘brand’ advertising, but brand advertising will have a low chance of success unless your company is a household name. Those large companies which use this method have spent thousands if not millions establishing their brand. If you are a small business, then brand advertising will be a waste of your money. Instead, you would need an advertisement that will generate direct responses. The bonus of this is that response advertising is easier to measure to see if it’s working for you.

So how do you put together a direct response advert? How to target your advertisement:

Headline

The most important part of the whole advert is the headline. If you don’t have an actual headline, it’s the first few words of the advert itself. It MUST capture the reader’s attention.

Tip! If you have been using your company’s name on your headline, stop; you should use this important space to lead with an exciting statement about your product or service.

Main Body

The body of your advert should speak to the reader personally and inform them about specific benefits they will receive from your product or service.

Call-To-Action

Don’t forget to include a call to action! It tells your audience what they should do to follow through, get in touch with you, place an order, etc. Furthermore, when booking an advert, you should insist that it is placed on the right-hand page, where people’s eyes are drawn first, so statistically, more people will actually view and respond to your advert. Don’t book a long advertising run, or a large advert, until you have tested the advert first, and only re-book if it’s working for you. Don’t waste your money on ineffective advertising; you could get much better results for less money using a mixture of other marketing methods. Only use adverts that have proved profitable for you.

There you have it, how to target your advertisement and not waste money. Do you need help with advertising? Contact us now!