Ad Talk 101 Blog

What are they?

E-blasts can be anything from a newsletter to a basic call to action sales offer sent via e-mail to a list you’ve built. E-blasts are not necessarily free. While you could email to large numbers of people using a traditional email program at no charge, we recommend you either purchase a program to help you do your own e-blasts or sign up with a company that lets you use their service on-line. Both options make it easy with step by step instructions and templates. Whether you purchase your own software or use an on-line service, both make it easier to stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM act.

How It Works
You collect emails and build a list by soliciting current or potential customers for their e-mail address. Common ways of doing this is by offering discounts or valuable information via the e-blast. Most e-blast services offer reporting that tells you how many people opened your message and whether they acted upon the links within.

Why It Works
The valuable statistics in the reports allows you to tailor your message for best results and send it to the right people. By profiling your list you can segment it into sub-interest groups, targeting your customers even further. In the end, relevancy is what really makes the message work. You could run ads in front of thousands of people who will never notice it if there is nothing relevant to them. Running the same ad in front of a thousand people interested in the content and most, if not all will notice it.

In Closing
While it takes some up-front work to build an email list and write and design the e-blasts, this is something you should consider. E-blasts can provide immediate responses and results – something that few advertising methods can provide.

Your customers are turning to the internet more for product education and reviews. In this series we’ll show you how to meet them there with these simple, cheap (or free!) methods.

This has been a very rough first quarter for most of the businesses we know. Aim Advertising has had an enormous increase in business owners calling to ask “what can I do to get business in the door when I have very little money to spend?” In our twenty-five plus years of advising clients we have never been out of great ideas for little or no budget advertisers. Here are two of the calls and the free advice we gave them.

Caller 1 – I have a Chinese restaurant and would like to do a direct mail with my menus and try to increase our take out business. What would that cost?

I suggested several different size lists and went over the mailing cost with each. There seemed to be no small list she could afford. I them ask her if she had a list of email clients and she said no so that ruled out an e-blast. Then I asked her is she had a good amount of menus printed and she said she had stacks. I then suggested she walk the streets and put those menus on doors offering free delivery. She asked, can I do that? I said, Obama did. So that is what she did. Several days latter I had a hair appointment at a local establishment and when I walked in all the hairdressers had just ordered Chinese. Their comment was they did not know she would deliver for free. Our office also did not know that. I bet our whole street did not know! I have a feeling her campaign was a great success.

Oh, and one more tip I gave her. Set up a drawing in your restaurant and on a monthly basis give away a dinner for four. Explain all you have to do to win is give us your email address for our e-news letters.

Caller 2 – We are going to have cut your own flowers for a few short months our business is off the beaten path what can we do to advertise.

Again direct mail or radio would have eaten up all her profits for such a seasonal endeavor and setting up at farmers markets or roadside stands was out of the question because of manpower. Our solution was: With the May elections over within a week pick a winning candidate and ask if you can have some of his roadside political signs. He obviously would not need them any more and you would be doing him a favor picking them up. Recover them with laminated posters from Staples and set them out on the three major highways to point customers to your farm.

There are a million ways to advertise just put your head to it and be ready to do a little work. By the way it was a coincident both ideas came from political maneuvers.

Many times in my career I have heard advertisers say “I would like to just stop advertising, period, and see what happens.” But in my 28 years in advertising I never saw an advertiser really put it to the test until this year.

Sometime in September of 2007 one of our agency clients who owns a furniture store agreed to sell his store. The Store Owner continued to advertise at his usual rate of about 8% of sales up until November of that year. Expecting to change hands by the end of the year the Store Owner decided not to advertise for the last six weeks or so. Then, there were delays in the sale due to things like getting a lease signed and various other procedural obstacles. So the Store Owner and the Buyer agreed to an arrangement where the Buyer would work with Store Owner until they can close on the deal.

One thing lead to another and a year later the Store Owner was still operating the store exactly like he did for the previous 15 years at that location. He operated exactly the same except for one thing, the advertising. He didn’t do any. Well, almost none. With the exception of a few small black and white newspaper ads in August – November which represented less than about 10% of his normal budget, the Store Owner did no advertising for the previous eight months.

The result was a 42% drop in sales from the previous year. An interesting observation the Store Owner made was he noticed the first few months he stopped advertising his business continues to run strong and then began to taper off..

So there you go. But remember, all businesses are unique. That means if you stopped advertising, your results may be different. But if you are in the furniture business you may not want to try this.

1. Do not spread your budget across too many media.
2. Determine the media that works best for your business
3. If the media that works best for you is a mass media, dominate it or don’t use it.
4. To make your ad work, it needs to be believable.To be believable you need to be specific with your claims.Avoid words like biggest or best.Replace with actual numbers or some sort of definitive descriptions.
5. Advertise when your product is moving; promote when sales are slow.

When you are presented with a package from an advertising media representative, ask yourself this: is this package designed to help my business or the media selling it? By nature, packages are cookie cutter solutions. Every business is unique. Even businesses in the same industry may have different strategies, market areas, and customer profiles. So the rule of thumb is not to buy packages. Buy what gets you the most audience for the money. And whenever possible, negotiate added value that works for your unique business. This way you make the package that works for you.

Any agreement longer than 3 months is a long term agreement. You need all the flexibility you can get with your ad budget. You also want the media to work as hard as possible for your business. Make them earn your business every three months. Long term agreements such as 12 month contracts may be lower than short term rates, but we have found it is usually better to pay a little more to get what you want than being locked into a schedule that often forces you to waste advertising to fulfill a commitment.

Next time we’ll lay out the advertising rules of thumb.

Before the internet, most advertising budgets went to some form of mass media. But today the internet is becoming the dominant advertising media for more and more business. There will always be a need for mass media advertising. That need has changed by varying degrees depending on the industry. For example, as little as five years ago, car dealers dominated many media such as radio and newspaper. Today, most car dealers have cut back on mass media and increased their internet efforts. This is happening more and more in most other retail sectors.

The reason for this is a paradigm shift giving the consumer unprecedented control over what advertising they are exposed to. As consumers spend more time with computers and the internet, they spend less time with media such as newspaper, radio, and TV. Consumers can now watch TV on more channels, cable or satellite, and on the internet, raising the cost and complexity for advertisers buying the medium. Downloading TV programs over the internet, premium channel viewing, and DVR’s can almost eliminate all commercial viewing.

Local radio advertisers are losing audience to mp3 players, satellite radio, and the internet. Newspapers are losing readers to the internet. So if you advertise and are doing it the same way you did 10, 20 or more years ago, you are probably wasting a lot of money.

I’m not saying you should stop using any of these media. They all still work. They just may not work the same as they used to. So my advice is if you have been advertising for 10 or more years, it is time to reevaluate.

Next time we’ll evaluate packages and long term commitments.