Advertising

On Wednesday we delivered a marketing planning workshop at TAGTribe’s SME 2.0 meeting. Working with Phil Szomsor from Citigate Dewe Rogerson we planned the session around Able Power, a London based energy brokerage firm which has spent the last 18 months proving it’s business model and is now looking for growth.

Kudos to Darren Jones from Able Power for opening up his business as a live case study. We hope you get a lot from the exercise.

The idea behind the session was to do something different i.e. not a pure play slide deck presentation, but where the whole TAG community would get something of value. I hope we have achieved this and certainly some of the feedback so far suggests it was a good exercise.

Just in case I need to reiterate the benefits of planning your marketing rather than picking ad-hoc opportunities – aside from avoiding the headless chicken trap – they include:

• Easier to manage the performance of your marketing
• Focus on tactics that are driving a return on investment
• Better control of your budgets, or helping you to set a budget in the first instance
• Reduce your costs (and increase profits)
• Maintain sanity!

Anyway, enough of the waffle, here are the slides from the night as many of you requested.

I love entertaining TV advertising. This one by Nike is a classic example of big brand advertising at its best – funny, carrying a message, memorable and so much more. But as a small business can you use brand advertising as a marketing tool?

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I’ve been working with small businesses for long enough to know that most standard advertising is fairly ineffective for generating sales pipeline. Sadly I have learnt this the hard way, by wasting money on adverts that have generated a negative return on investment – the negative element being the loss of cash and moral! So why then do I occasionally get caught out by advertising sales reps?

A question I had to ask myself recently when I booked a quarter page ad in a publication in London that turned out to be a bit of a toad. The reason I would hazard a guess is twofold:

1. the skill of the sales rep in presenting a compelling opportunity, and

2. the client’s real need for new leads in these difficult economic conditions made me think twice

Of course when I learnt my advice on this one was a little wayward, I did the only decent thing and offered to cover the cost of the advert should the promised sales leads not appear. Watch this space to see if I have to get my cheque book out.

The other result is that I’ve decided to compile a checklist of questions I must ask and fully understand before I place an order. With the aim of helping everyone to get a better return on their advertising investment, I thought I’d share this here.

• Is the publication readership the same as my target audience / decision maker? (note it is important to really understand your target audience first!)
• Do I clearly understand the target audience description provided by the publication?
• Have I heard of the publication or is it launching?
• What is the format of the publication – A4, A5, glossy, newspaper, portrait, landscape, colour or black and white etc?
• Exactly what size will the advert be?
• Can I secure a guaranteed right hand page? (important as an advert placed on a right hand page generally outperforms those on the left hand page)
• Are any of my competitors advertising?
• What is the publication date?
• What is the publication’s reach – not just the circulation, but total reach?
• Will they offer any guarantees – cost per enquiry for example? (unlikely but worth asking)
• Can the publisher help to put together the creative?
• Have any of my competitors / peers advertised in the publication and if so what results did they achieve? (also, could I have their contact details so I can talk to them and find out about their experiences?)
• What is the total price?

These questions will help me to better understand whether the opportunity will present a return on investment i.e. a value of sales greater than the cost of the advertising. Ultimately, there are lots of other factors which will impact the success of the advert which are not the responsibility of the publication.

In particular, the quality of the text and images used in the advert and the strength of the call to action. For some guidelines on good advert copywriting, check out this post by freelance advertising copywriter John Kuraoka.

I’d very much like to hear the experiences of other small business advertisers as to how you measure and interpret whether an opportunity will present good value?

Absolutely classic advertising!

Happy easter everyone!

I came across this article on eMarketer today and it makes some interesting reading. It’s essentially a summary of the results of a survey conducted by Nielsen into which types of advertising are most trusted by internet users. The survey was conducted in 47 different countries across the globe so it’s pretty comprehensive. So what then was the number one response to the question of which form of advertising is most trusted…..

wait for it….

it’s ‘recommendations from consumers’, which was ranked number one by 78% of respondents.

What does this mean for us internet marketers then?

Well recommendations from consumers are essentially word of mouth in the offline world, but online this can mean comments in forums, blog posts, ratings sites and other user generated content. Worth keeping an eye out for anything written about you or your product then, perhaps by setting up Google Alert.

If you see some bad comments, make sure you investigate why and turn those unhappy customers into happy customers. if you receive a lot of good comments, start incorporating those as testimonials on your sales literature and squeeze pages.

What’s also interesting about the survey results comes further down the results.

61% rated comments posted online (which in my mind is the same as recommendations from consumers) and 49% rated email subscriptions as effective forms of advertising. A lot further down come search engine ads and banners at 34% and 26% respectively.

You might want to keep these figures in mind next time you put a marketing campaign together, or think about a traffic promotion. If recommendations from consumers are twice as likely to be effective, you might want to spend twice as much time generating positive customer experiences than setting up Payperclick ads.

Anyway, read the full report at the fantastic eMarketer site.

Sorry ladies, but I have to show this example of great brand advertising.

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Anyone interested in internet advertising?

The Times reports that

“Global spending on internet advertising increased from $18.7 billion in 2005 to $24.9 billion (£12.6 billion) last year, according to ZenithOptimedia, the media-buying agency.”

and,

“Although spending on traditional media, such as magazines and radio, has been falling in the UK, more than £2 billion was spent on internet advertising in 2006.”

and,

“The Middle East and Asia are driving a boom in global advertising spending.”

What does this mean to you and me? Increasing competition for advertising space and increasing prices for a start. Not only that, increasing competition for reaching your target audiences, so you’d better be more targeted, or more creative than your competitors.

Also, if you are an online publisher / media owner you’d better set your stall out properly to earn some of that advertising spend. Especially if you have a strong readership in the UK or the Middle East.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (www.iabuk.com) released news today that advertising spend online ‘nears £1 billion for the first six months of 2006′. Wow, that’s a lot of money!. It represents just over 10% of total spending on advertising in the UK from January to June 2006. The IAB goes on to compare that to the market shares of the other advertising mediums:

• outdoor advertising 5.1%
• consumer magazines 4.6%
• radio advertising 3.4%
• TV advertising 22.7%
• national press 11.4%

So what does this mean for you, the small business owner?

Well, it means your competitors are heading online to get new business. They’re advertising on the internet for the simple reason that it works and you need to make sure you don’t miss out. You need to think seriously about paid for search, or Payperclick advertising. Then there are online display ads, such as banners, pop ups and others. And of course there’s your website. Make sure you know what you want your website to achieve so it communicates clearly with your customers. For example, is it designed to sell, or to collect customer contact details?

One thing is clear. If you’re a business owner and you aren’t currently taking the internet seriously, it’s time to think again. This is one of the key areas of marketing you need to master.