Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

To Ad or Not to Ad

Dave Dresen, Director of Design, Logoworks

Yellow pages or newspaper? Magazine or flyer? What about door hangers, internet ads, paper inserts, postcards or even promotional SWAG? The options for advertising are endless, so how do you choose which media to use, or even more important, the style, use of color, or size of the advertising piece you are contemplating? Well I can tell you that how you design an advertising piece relies heavily on the end use or means of production. Here are a few pointers you need to keep in mind when deciding upon your marketing approach.

Who is your target audience? You really need to have an understanding of who your audience is and what is the most effective way of making an impact on them. It’s not just a matter of sending them a coupon in the mail and expecting them to swarm your business the next week. We all know that unless you receive something in the mail you are expecting, looking to buy, or interested in, you won’t spend more than 30 seconds looking at it. The fact of the matter is even if you are interested in the material, and are looking to purchase, 80% of you will still use it under the birdcage. The importance of understanding your target audience and then giving them something they will be interested in is key to your success.

What are the most effective means of reaching them? There are many ways to go about advertising, and there are multiple factors to consider within this category alone. I will go over the most important ones.

1.Cost – This seems to pop up in whatever we talk about, but it is something you must consider, and has a big impact on all aspects of advertising. You first must know and understand that advertising is not going to be your biggest expense to your company, but it will have one of the biggest impacts on it, second only to your product itself. “You have to spend money to make money” is the easiest way to explain the importance of advertising. Don’t cut corners with this aspect of your business! It may be tempting to just go with the cheapest and easiest route, but, as they say, you get what you pay for.

2. Media – The type of media you use to advertise with coincides with cost, but I want to talk about it on its own because it’s important. Media is the material you choose to print on and the avenue through which you choose to advertise. Each media requires a different approach. For example, a billboard needs to be eye-catching, and extremely concise, while a brochure can be more informative and in-depth. Or let’s say you are putting one ad in the local paper, and another in a local business magazine. You don’t want to use the same ad in both media outlets.

Hey, didn’t he talk to us about branding and the importance of consistency? Well, yes I have and I’ll explain what I mean. Your local newspaper uses lesser quality, lower grade paper than the magazine, for obvious reasons of cost and efficiency. They also have different target audiences. So a simpler ad with fewer colors and a general message will probably work better for a newspaper, while a magazine ad will allow for costlier materials, a more targeted message and richer design because magazines allow for higher quality prints and go to a smaller, more specific audience.

If you want your ad to stand out, you have to understand where it will be printed, who will be looking at it, and what your competition is doing.

3. Professional Design – You knew I was going to get to this eventually. There is no substitute for a professionally designed ad. We know the quality of ads in the phonebook or newspaper (no offense Vinny), but if you want a clean, professional layout you really need to have it done somewhere else. Using ten different fonts, having bold, italic, and underlined text in the same ad, and squeezing starbursts in wherever possible is probably not the direction you want to go. Even if you are running nothing but phonebook ads, there is no reason you can’t have a nice, clean, professional design. This is where the branding of your product continues.

Don’t settle for the design you can get from the phone book company. You can easily have your designer do the ad and send it to them. Your ad will stand out from the competition if you get it professionally designed, especially if your competitors just went with the phonebook design department for their ad designs. I guarantee it! Every call that ad generates is one your competitors did not, and you’re that much closer to that Road King Custom or Bimmer you’ve always wanted.

It comes down to this; there are so many different ways to reach out to your customers that it really depends on how much you want to spend, but the one constant through all of this is the necessity of a professional design. Bill Bernbach, an advertising pioneer, once said that, “you can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.”

Understanding what your customer wants, how to reach them, and then how to deliver that message in a manner that will produce the most conversion is something you need to work through with your design/marketing team. If you don’t have one, or aren’t sure if you have one we would love to help you out.

           

Posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Graphic Design, Marketing, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.