The display ad is the offline area most businesses look to rapidly increase sales online.
When developed with care and used with caution, an offline display ad can be highly effective in increasing your online traffic.
However, running expensive display ads is extremely risky and more often than not their ROI is very low.
Of course most salespeople who sell these ads won't tell you this.
Instead they'll tell you about their large readership, and how if just a small percentage of their readers respond to you ad, you'll still get a huge response.
It just makes sense.
Run a big ad, get tons of visitors to your web site, make a lot of sales and get rich.
Unfortunately, it doesn't usually work that way.
What happens is you pay big bucks for a large ad, and when it runs you don't get any response.
No visitors, no orders and no calls.
Now you've lost the entire amount you paid for the display ad with nothing to show for the ad.
Most small business owners that haven't run a large display ad before simply don't believe this can happen.
They can't conceive that they won't get a response from a large ad.
But I can tell you from personal experience it happens.
A lot more often than anyone selling these ads wants you to know.
For this reason I strongly recommend that anyone thinking about buying an expensive display ad to promote their product or website should consider the risk.
If you can't afford to lose everything you invest in the ad, don't do it.
In most cases, a simple press release can be more effective and a lot less expensive than a large display ad.
It's true that we have had considerable success with some of our full page display ads, but after several early failures we set up some guidelines to follow when running these ads.
These guidelines are as follows: 1.
We always test ads in low cost publications.
Rarely do we ever pay more than $600 for a full page ad--even in national publications.
Offline advertising or print advertising is becoming more and more expensive because the Internet is killing the industry.
Your advertising dollar can sometimes stretch further if you simply keep your advertising on the web.
2.
Our full page ads are always run in laser targeted, limited circulation publications.
We only run ads in places that we know people that want and need our products will see.
"Carpet Bombing" style advertising simply doesn't work anymore and can be the death of a company.
3.
We always run a break-even analysis before we place an ad so we know for sure exactly how many sales we'll need just to pay for the ad.
If the numbers are realistic we run the ad, if not we don't! It's simple.
4.
We always create the display ads ourselves.
We never try to sell directly from the display ad but instead entice the reader to visit our web site or sales page.
We then sell them from our web page.
That way we have absolute control over the content, the structure of the offer, and exact wording.
We test and then we test some more.
Testing makes all of the difference.
5.
We always request specific ad placement in the magazine or newsletter.
We usually request a right hand page in the back two thirds of the magazine.
Never let a magazine decide where they'll place your display ad.
6.
We always try to negotiate the price of each display ad.
Usually we pay about 45% of the printed rate card rate and sometimes we pay much less than that.
By following these guidelines we are able to reduce our exposure to financial loss on display ads in the various publications that we use.
If the ad fails to work, we still lose money and momentum, but not nearly as much if we had blindly run expensive ads without doing our homework first.
© 2007 Affordable Concrete Cutting Massachusetts MA, All Rights Reserved
When developed with care and used with caution, an offline display ad can be highly effective in increasing your online traffic.
However, running expensive display ads is extremely risky and more often than not their ROI is very low.
Of course most salespeople who sell these ads won't tell you this.
Instead they'll tell you about their large readership, and how if just a small percentage of their readers respond to you ad, you'll still get a huge response.
It just makes sense.
Run a big ad, get tons of visitors to your web site, make a lot of sales and get rich.
Unfortunately, it doesn't usually work that way.
What happens is you pay big bucks for a large ad, and when it runs you don't get any response.
No visitors, no orders and no calls.
Now you've lost the entire amount you paid for the display ad with nothing to show for the ad.
Most small business owners that haven't run a large display ad before simply don't believe this can happen.
They can't conceive that they won't get a response from a large ad.
But I can tell you from personal experience it happens.
A lot more often than anyone selling these ads wants you to know.
For this reason I strongly recommend that anyone thinking about buying an expensive display ad to promote their product or website should consider the risk.
If you can't afford to lose everything you invest in the ad, don't do it.
In most cases, a simple press release can be more effective and a lot less expensive than a large display ad.
It's true that we have had considerable success with some of our full page display ads, but after several early failures we set up some guidelines to follow when running these ads.
These guidelines are as follows: 1.
We always test ads in low cost publications.
Rarely do we ever pay more than $600 for a full page ad--even in national publications.
Offline advertising or print advertising is becoming more and more expensive because the Internet is killing the industry.
Your advertising dollar can sometimes stretch further if you simply keep your advertising on the web.
2.
Our full page ads are always run in laser targeted, limited circulation publications.
We only run ads in places that we know people that want and need our products will see.
"Carpet Bombing" style advertising simply doesn't work anymore and can be the death of a company.
3.
We always run a break-even analysis before we place an ad so we know for sure exactly how many sales we'll need just to pay for the ad.
If the numbers are realistic we run the ad, if not we don't! It's simple.
4.
We always create the display ads ourselves.
We never try to sell directly from the display ad but instead entice the reader to visit our web site or sales page.
We then sell them from our web page.
That way we have absolute control over the content, the structure of the offer, and exact wording.
We test and then we test some more.
Testing makes all of the difference.
5.
We always request specific ad placement in the magazine or newsletter.
We usually request a right hand page in the back two thirds of the magazine.
Never let a magazine decide where they'll place your display ad.
6.
We always try to negotiate the price of each display ad.
Usually we pay about 45% of the printed rate card rate and sometimes we pay much less than that.
By following these guidelines we are able to reduce our exposure to financial loss on display ads in the various publications that we use.
If the ad fails to work, we still lose money and momentum, but not nearly as much if we had blindly run expensive ads without doing our homework first.
© 2007 Affordable Concrete Cutting Massachusetts MA, All Rights Reserved
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