Is Your Business Advertising Effective? – How Do You Know?
It really does amaze me the number of businesses who advertise purely for the sake of advertising. If you were to randomly ask ten business owners why they advertise, nine out of the ten will most likely say, because everyone else does or something similar.
This may seem like a strange thing to do but it is a serious challenge that is rarely addressed, especially by the smaller business owners. The real question that needs to be answered is; are you potentially tipping vast amounts of your hard earned profits down the drain because of ineffective advertising campaigns?
The best kept secret in the world of advertising is that most business advertising does not work. However, don’t expect anyone who sells ad space to tell you that. Because most businesses don’t monitor how well or badly any particular advertising campaign is doing, very few are aware of this fact.
Just because you have advertising budget doesn’t mean you have to spend it without knowing what return you are getting. There are a multitude of sins committed when it comes to publicity but here are three key elements that you absolutely must get right every time if you are to avoid profit depletion.
1. Always Test and Measure.
It is paramount that you test and measure any advertising. This applies to all forms of promotion, TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and any other medium you use. It would seem like an obvious thing to do but very few businesses actually do it. A focused plan has to be in place so that you know, with absolute certainty that the ad you are running is worthwhile and producing a return on investment. If it is not stop it! Again this would seem obvious and logical but it doesn’t always happen. Some companies will run ads for weeks and months, spending thousands of pounds or dollars with absolutely no idea if the ad is producing a profitable outcome.
2. The Headline.
Your headline is the most important part of any ad. If the headline does not catch the readers attention, your ad will not get read, period. I see ads all the time, where the headline is the company name and logo. The truth is nobody cares about your company name or if you’ve been established for 125 years. The headline must always appeal to your targeted audience and where possible include a benefit. Which headline is more likely to attract your attention?
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The moral of the story is, take care with headlines. They can make or break your return on investment. Getting your headline right can increase your response rate by as much as 50% to 100%.
3. Printed Ads. Rule #1 Never advertise on a left hand page.
Now, some say that this little gem is all psychobabble and nonsense. Ask any of the worlds greatest marketers though and they will agree on this point. Test it for yourself! Next time you see someone flicking through a newspaper or magazine, watch their eye movement. It will almost always be orientated towards the right hand page. It really can make a huge difference in creating a successful campaign and has been proven time and time again.
It’s not always easy but you have to be strong on this point. Some publications might say they can’t guarantee this. Just tell them that you may advertise with them when they can and more often than not they will oblige.
If you can get these 3 elements in place then your advertising campaigns will be more successful than the majority of your competition. Obviously there are other ground rules that make up a successful campaign and a little research will go a long way. But having read this article and honestly implementing these points, you will already be streets ahead of the pack.
In conclusion, before you embark on your next advertising venture think about this. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” – Albert Einstein.
Paul Sutherland is an Accelerated Business Growth Coach. His company – Daniel Thomas International – www.dti.eu.com helps SMEs to grow their businesses with tried tested and proven techniques and strategies, whilst increasing their bottom line profits at the same time.
Effective Email Marketing with Integrated Technology & Measuring for Business Success
Introduction
Many organizations are utilizing email marketing as part of their internet marketing strategy. There are numerous email marketing services provided that support all types of businesses such as: Emma, ConstantContact, Aweber, etc. In today’s environment, businesses are sending emails to promote products & services, cross-sell additional services, inform customers, and provide discount coupons. The question is: Are businesses leveraging email marketing to support multi-tactical internet marketing campaigns?
In most cases, businesses are not leveraging email marketing to drive successful campaigns. Marketers continue to see email marketing as a single tactic that has a limited impact on the goals of their campaigns. The biggest example of this is the lack of integration between databases, website, and email marketing campaigns. A local business owner has a limited amount of hours in a day and a limited amount of resources. However, most of them do not streamline the lead acquisition process to work together. If the systems were integrated, a similar scenario can be applied to large corporations that employ or utilize 3 different employees to do the job of a single email marketing professional. Simply put, the website form does populate to the database, and neither of these automatically feed to the email marketing system. In general, this is a manual process that costs businesses time, resource, and money.
How can effective Email Marketing Help Your Business and Drive Results?
How you ask? Well, let’s start with efficiency. The ability to integrate your website with your business’s database, website forms, and email marketing services tools may cost additional money upfront; however, in the long-run you will not need to use manual processes that require more resources. At DaBrian Marketing Group, we provide businesses will the tools to connect website forms to an email marketing system and eliminate the database itself. In our client’s case, the email marketing system or email marketing service is the database. In addition, you can use event or email triggers to confirm opt-in email addresses after receiving a contact submission form. In less than 30 seconds, you have populated your form into a specific list with the email marketing tool, confirmed an opt-in email, and responded to a prospect with relevant content.
Email triggers can be a useful and impactful tool for customer acquisition & lead generation. We live in a society of instant gratification so being able to deliver relevant information or set the expectation to receive a response to a question is critical. This can help to separate your business from the competition.
The ability to reduce the resources used for an email marketing campaign will reduce the campaign cost. If implemented effectively, email marketing can position your business to be on your customers’ minds and reduce your overall acquisition cost. The bottom-line is Return-on-Investment.
Testing to Drive Results & Revenue?
Once you have become proficient with your automated process, it is time to start testing your email campaigns. There are a number of different tests you can do with a single email campaign. These tests include A/B, A/B/C, and multivariate testing of headers, subject lines, layouts, landing pages or calls-to-action. The more successful your business is at getting customers to open emails, the greater the probability that the customer will respond to your call-to-action. Usually, better open rates and click through rates translate to better ROI.
Conclusion
The truth is that just about every business uses email marketing to communicate with customers. Unfortunately, not every business takes the time to evaluate opportunities to integrate technologies, test, or measure their results. These are simple fundamental businesses practices that should be gone. The ability to establish internal processes and best practices are critical to every business’s success.
The fact that you have an email marketing tool does not mean that what you are communicating is relevant to customers, or even driving results. It is our recommendation that businesses start to take a holistic approach to all internet marketing strategies & tactics. Continue to push the envelope for maximum results that will lead to maximum returns.
DaBrian Marketing Group is a Search Engine Marketing & Web Analytics agency located in Reading, PA 19606
Business Advertising: Is It Effective?
A lot of business owners contribute a lot to make their businesses turn a profit, but how do you figure out how effective your business advertising is? Can you just go by the increase in sales and the inquiries that come in after you have released the advertisements? Or maybe there are a number of factors involved? Does the same hold true for internet marketing as well?
Offline business advertising relies upon many factors which include the kind of media you use, the budget you have allotted, the objective of your advertisements, your target market and the phase of accuracy and consistency of your advertising. These elements would have to be added in before you could conclude that a particular advertisement is effective. You also need to know what kind of response you would expect to get from your consumers based on what you are advertising.
Basically, you need to know your niche market and what consumers are looking for. Another factor is the cost that is required to launch an advertisement and how long it will be seen by the consumer. Business advertising experts have different views on the best way to gauge the performance or effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
Overall though, advertisements can be very beneficial to the promotional efforts of any business because it enables the clients to become aware that such business does exist and that it can provide a product or service that they need.
It is hard to gauge the performance of your ads when it comes to offline businesses. It takes a lot of time to calculate the outcome of your business advertising efforts and you don’t get real-time statistics. However, when it comes to online businesses and internet marketing, there are many tools readily available to track the performance of your ads.
There are many different services out there that will allow you to put a piece of code into your advertising link. When someone clicks on your link the tracking code generates a hit on your report page and gives you the referring link and other valuable information. You can set up as many tracking codes as you need for all your links that you want to promote.
Say you want to make changes to your homepage but want to track how those changes effect your results. You can create a second homepage by creating an index2.html file and then with some code you can rotate the original homepage with the new one. The homepage will rotate for each person that visits your site. You can track your hits through your website stats and see which homepage performs better.
No matter what changes you make to your internet marketing advertising there are ways to be able to track its success, or failure. Then, you can take the results and tweak your ads accordingly until you start getting amazing results. The best part is you can see in real-time how well your internet marketing ads are doing and fix them quickly without losing precious time, because time is money.
Alan Mater has been using free business advertising methods to generate targeted traffic to his websites. Looking for a way to make an honest online income? Look at these ideas to earn money and use free business advertising to make extra money from home.
Effective Way For Free Internet Business Advertising With 104Inc
When you look at the statistics associated with online businesses, it is easy to understand why free internet business advertising is so vital to success. For instance, based in the United States alone, there are some 25 million businesses, many of those with a website. Of all mediums for getting word out about the type of product and/or service these businesses offer, the internet has been and will continue to be the most powerful. Unfortunately, less than 10% of websites use internet advertising and marketing efficiently, meaning they are floundering because they are not getting the level of traffic needed to grow and thrive.
For more details login to free dropshipping info considering that more than 11 million searchers are performed every month using search engines, you can see that using free internet business advertising will help promote your business. Instead of wasting time, money, and effort, all you need to do is use some type of free internet business advertising medium. When done properly, you will find that the level of traffic to your site increases dramatically, lookers are converted into actual customers at a higher percentage, and soon, you have tons of online publicity. Article marketing, email or database marketing and auto responder marketing are effective Internet advertising methods.
Constant contact with prospective customers and your current client base will give you a huge advantage over your competitors who are not following up with customers. This means using a variety of options for free internet business advertising, keeping these people posted of sales, new products, upcoming seminars, etc. The more you can stay in touch the more the connection becomes more familiar, almost personal. More and more, online companies are using articles and blogs as the number one free internet business advertising technique. With this, you can write solid content that readers need and want, and then submit them to various submitter programs. Not only is this process fast and requires practically no effort whatsoever, but it is very convenient and doesn\’t cost a penny. For details visit to :www.outsource-beginners.com .As a result, the content of the articles reaches a much broader audience, which in turn, increases overall sales. Remember, because the internet is constantly changing, you need to stay proficient in the ways you target potential customers.
Using new techniques and developments will help build your online business. Most people who have an online business believe they have to spend a fortune in advertising and marketing but this is untrue. Drawing more visitors to your site is possible without having to spend a fortune thanks to the many internet marketing options available that are free. Keep in mind that before you use any free internet business advertising, you have to have a great product and/or service, as well as a great website. Your goal, naturally, is to bring Internet users to your website, easily find what they want and buy it. Therefore, a company website is the cornerstone of every online business. You can then begin to figure out which of the many free Internet business advertising options are right for your business.
Our story at 104Inc is simple: We like to help others. Imagine a team that consists of family and friends who all have the same passion in life. Imagine a group of individuals who sacrifice so much everyday in-order to attain their goal and one day live their dream. Now, imagine the amount of effort, motivation and discipline it takes for ordinary people like us having a burning desire to accomplish something extraordinary. Here at http://www.104Inc.com, we have the opportunity to do all of that. We have, the aspiration, the zeal and the motivation to help others in areas where they are less fortunate, including our own family and friends.
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