What’s the Deal with Advertising? (Part 2)

So you know you need to advertise, and you have some ideas on where to start – but how do you advertise effectively?

What is effective advertising?

Once you’ve decided where you’re going to advertise, the next thing you need to prepare is the advertisement itself.

Since I don’t have any experience in television or radio, I won’t cover those platforms (although some of what I’m going to say may apply).

Text-only Ads

Ads that consist of text only (i.e. Google Adwords) work entirely different than image based ads. Here are some tips for maximizing your results:

Capitalize every first letter of every word. Although this may not be grammatically correct, it will help catch the attention of your reader.

Take a look at this example to experience what I mean:

Download Your Free Trial Now

compared with:

Download your free trial now

Google won’t let you throw on caps lock for entire words, nor can you use exclamation marks excessively, but they will allow you to capitalize the first letter of every word.

Ask a question. Instead of saying:

Lose 20 Pounds In One Week

try:

What If You Lost 20 Pounds in One Week?

Asking questions makes your advertisement a bit more personable and relatable.

Call to action. Make sure you include some sort of call to action in your ad. Whether it’s “Free 30 Day Trial Download” or “Sign Up Now” – if you aren’t asking your audience to do anything, there’s less motivation for them to click through.

Image Ads (web)

Image ads allow you to do much more than you can with text-only advertisements. Here are some tips for creating image ads:

Use negative space. Don’t clutter your advertisement with unnecessary images or text – having negative space can work wonders for your click through rate (CTR). Take a look at some of the advertisements displayed throughout the Fusion network to see what I mean.

Use nice fonts. If you aren’t quite the typography expert, stick with Helvetica or something fairly clean and simple. Choosing the wrong font can lower conversion rates, and effect the perception people have of your company. If the font is unreadable, nobody will know what you’re saying and your CTR will suffer.

Forget about reverse type for body text. It makes copy difficult to read. Use reverse only to emphasize short phrases.

It’s not a rainbow. Unless you’re selling rainbows (or your product has a multi-colour theme to it), try using 1-3 colours MAX. Having too many different colours throws off the viewer and, again, will lower your CTR.

Incentive. Give them a reason to click through. “Free Trial”, or “30% Off”, etc.

Logo or product? Depending on the ad size, you may only be able to fit an image of or related to the product/service you’re selling – OR your company logo. If you’re going after branding, the company logo is a better idea. If you’re just starting off, I’d recommend using imagery directly related to the product or service.

Image Ads (print/magazine)

While quite similar to image ads on the web, print ads differ in a few different ways. Here are some ideas for getting the most out of print ads:

Stand out. Take a look at the other advertisements in the same publication and do something to stand out. If they’re all in colour, try black and white. If they’re all crowded, try using a lot of negative space. If they’re all showing images, try doing something creative with typography. Most important of all, be different and provocative in what you promise to the reader.

Branding. Print ads can help you increase brand awareness. By showing up consistently in the same magazine for an entire year you’ll expose readers to your company repeatedly. They will be more likely consider your product or service when they come across it later (on the web, in person, on TV, etc.).

Incentive. If you want to track the traffic a print ad brings you to your website, you have a few options:

• Buy a new domain. Instead of listing www.nike.com in your print ad (we’re promoting new basketball shoes), try finding a domain like www.jumphigher.com – a domain that is only known to the people who see the print ad (make sure you hide it from Google).

• Offer a promo code. By including a particular (trackable) promo code, i.e. “jumphigher2010” you’ll be able to tally up all sales that came from the ad.

• Unique phone numbers are available (at decent prices as far as I’ve heard) whereby you can keep track of all inbound calls that have come from your print ad.

Some of these tracking methods can also be used to track the ROI of online advertising, but are especially important if you’re trying to track it with print ads.

Tracking your online efforts is quite complex – but the benefits are extraordinary. Once you know what’s working, you can stop paying for ads that aren’t. Then, you can try variations of what’s working, and reach even higher levels of ad performance.

Unless you’re literally measuring exact advertising-to-sales numbers, measuring ROI isn’t easy.

Since I’ve run out time in this article, we’ll talk about the benefits of advertising beyond web traffic and conversions in part three of “What’s the Deal with Advertising?”.

If I can leave you with one last tip – take a look at the big boys out there. If you’ve seen a text or image ad running consistently for a long time, chances are, it’s working.