I wrote an article recently on my blog about internet advertising. It's a little long, but hope some will find it of some help - pls feel free to comment & add your own ideas/thoughts
Whether you’re a Fortune 500 giant, or a work-from-home mom, you’ve simply got to get your ad campaigns right. In this article we’ll be taking an insightful look into the world of advertising your internet business. We’ll look at some advertising howlers and gaff’s from some high profile brand names. We’ll touch upon what types of advertising may return the best bang for your buck. And, we’ll look at the importance of developing a long term, advertising system that gets you positive publicity and continually draws in new visitors, subscribers and clients for your business.
One of the major problems that newer and smaller internet business entrepreneurs find with their advertising efforts is the MULTITUDE of different advertising methods, schemes and (lets face it) scams that are out there. A lot of newbies are sucked into the “magic red button” approach – they waste valuable time and ad budget on “schemes” that promise dramatic results but in fact deliver zero exposure. It’s nice to think that after forking out a tenner, that your site will be placed in front of 1 million targeted buyers…but of course the ROI on that is a big fat ZERO.
Now, if you look up “how to advertise” in Google you’re met with about 166 million results. Is it any wonder that so many inexperienced people try and try to get exposure, traffic, clients…they try so many of the methods out there…they find the results woeful, and sadly quit on their business.
And, it’s not only the “where” of advertising that you’ve got to get right – it’s the “how” too. What medium will you use? How will you portray your ads? Because the “message” you send in your ads will have a big impact upon how you’re perceived by your target clients.
Even the biggest of companies get their advertising woefully wrong at times….
1. Think You’re The Only One Who Makes Mistakes In Advertising? Think Again…
One of the worst examples of a viral ad campaign I can think of is the “Starbucks viral experiment” in 2006. You see, the big brains at the Starbucks marketing department were reading all about how powerful viral advertising can be. To get a little publicity, Starbucks sent out an email to it’s staff with a “free iced coffee” coupon – the staff were encouraged to forward this to their family and friends, which they did with some vigour.
The viral reach of this campaign went far deeper than the Starbucks marketing men anticipated, because moments after sending the email, a stampede of people started queing at hundreds of Starbucks outlets, all of them clutching a free iced coffee voucher. At this point, I would have thought that Starbucks MBA team would be pleased – here’s a chance to build goodwill and further their client base for the price of an iced coffee. Unfortunately, Starbucks did a U-turn and decided to not honour the coupons.
This tells us 2 things – (1) Starbucks clearly didn’t understand the potential power of Viral advertising or how deep it can potentially reach, and (2) Starbucks employees clearly spend way too much time emailing their mates.
It was a classic example of a disasterous ad campaign. They created a lot of negative
PR, and with the abundance of coffee shops around, sent a lot of potential clients to a gleeful and smirking Coffee Republic.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that you must think very hard about your ad campaigns. You need to create a plan on how you’re going to generate the best ROI possible given your budget. You need to be clear on the ad methods you’ll use, and what you expect to generate from each…
2. How To Create An Effective Plan For Your Advertising
My home office is over-spilling with plans. Generally, I create a plan for most aspects of my business and file them carefully so I can refer to them, and change/add notes as required.
Here are a few things I suggest you include when you create your own “advertising blueprint”…
A. Learn as much as you can about advertising, and start noting down the most effective methods of both zero cost and paid advertising that people in your niche are using.
B. Come up with a monthly advertising budget that you believe you can comfortably afford. If you cannot afford paid advertising then you’ll need to focus on zero cost methods but realise that many of these are time intensive. Then, as your business starts to generate revenues, start investing a percentage of this into advertising.
C. For each method of advertising you identify, create an excel spreadsheet (or manual file if you prefer) and identify a goal for each of these. What is the ad method trying to achieve? A certain level of sales? Subscribers? Traffic? Then, after it begins make sure you can monitor the results. You can do this through software/scripts or by creating individual autoresponders/payment buttons for each specific ad campaign.
D. Understand the concept of business ratios. If you understand stocks then you already know that ratios form the basis of fundamental stock analysis. People look at the figures to see how the company is doing in various aspects before investing. A simple example of a ratio for your advertising is the cost per subscriber…
Cost Per Subscriber = Total Cost Of Ad / Number Subscribers
So, you may find that you’ve placed a banner ad in a forum which costs $50 and yielded 50 subscribers from it’s time. Then, of course the cost per subscriber would be $1 each. That’s why in point (3) we talked about the importance of segregating things like autoresponders and payment buttons – a simple way of finding out how your ad did. This is crucial because it allows you to identify (and reuse) successful campaigns and drop the dodo’s. The above is just one simple ratio you can use – think about others you may wish to analyse (ones dealing with sales revenues, new clients and so on). Ratio’s are key tools for managing and analysing a business – and as the head of your business you should be using them.
Once your plan has been devised, the real fun starts. You’re now ready to put it into place – to start getting new clients, new subscribers and so on for your business.
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