Advertising is an investment in your business and is similar to other investments that are designed to improve and expand your business. The return you receive depends on the planning and thought that precede the actual commitment and expenditure of advertising dollars. By first developing an effective advertising plan, you increase the likelihood of a positive return on your advertising investment, regardless of the amount of money you spend.

Four Basic Questions

The basic premise of an advertising plan requires you to thoroughly analyze the answers to key questions before you can make effective advertising decisions. There are four key questions to ask yourself:

1. What do I want my advertising to accomplish?


2. Who should my advertising speak to?


3. What should my advertising say?


4. What advertising medium should I use?

In a specific business situation, each question has any number of potential answers. As you think about each question, do not accept any answer until you have considered and explored the full range of possibilities.

What Do I Want My Advertising To Accomplish?

The first step in developing your advertising plan is to specify your advertising goals. Be as precise as you can as to why you are advertising and what you want to achieve. Everyone wants advertising to increase business, but for your advertising plan to work, it requires you to be more precise. Some possible goals for your advertising are:

To increase awareness of your business.
To attract competitors’ customers.
To increase the likelihood of keeping current customers and developing their loyalty.
To generate immediate sales or sales leads.

It is possible that you may want your advertising to achieve all of these goals plus some others. What is important is that you prioritize your goals. Advertising works best when it is developed to meet one specific goal at a time.

Who Should My Advertising Speak To?

Once you determine your advertising goals, you can then select the target audience for your message. Keep in mind that advertising that tries to reach “everyone” rarely succeeds. Successful advertising is written with a specific customer in mind. Try to picture the person you must reach in order to achieve your advertising goals. Try to describe your target consumers in each of the following:


Demographics: such as gender, age, income, location of residence or business, etc.
Behaviors: such as current awareness of your business; the products, services or vendors they currently use; loyalty to either you or your competitor’s business, etc.
Needs or desires: such as what benefits consumers look for, the basis on which they will decide whether to use your product or service, how your business can fulfill those needs, etc.

What Should My Advertising Say?

Once you know who your target audience is and what they are looking for in terms of the product or service you offer, you can decide what your advertising will say. Advertising should always be written to communicate a message that will be seen as important by your target customer. Your advertising should clearly and convincingly “speak” to your target audience, explaining the important benefits your product or service offers. In deciding how to discuss the major benefits of your product or service in your advertising, keep “AIDA” in mind: attract Attention, hold Interest, arouse Desire and motivate Action.

Where Should I Place My Advertising?

Every month, new advertising options become available. Beyond “traditional” media you can place ads in airports, on ski lifts and on television monitors in the front of grocery carts. Where you place your advertising should be guided by a simple principle: Go where your target audience will have the highest likelihood of seeing or hearing it. Many advertising media work well to reach a diverse range of target consumers. There is no single medium that is inherently good or bad. In fact, a good medium for one product or service may be a poor medium for another. As you consider media choices, look for one that fits your advertising goals, reaches your target efficiently and cost effectively and is within your advertising budget.

Learning how to persuade and influence will make the difference between hoping for a better income and having a better income. Beware of the common mistakes presenters and persuaders commit that cause them to lose the deal.

Conclusion

Persuasion is the missing puzzle piece that will ***** the code to dramatically increase your income, improve your relationships, and help you get what you want, when you want, and win friends for life. Ask yourself how much money and income you have lost because of your inability to persuade and influence. Think about it. Sure you’ve seen some success, but think of the times you couldn’t get it done. Has there ever been a time when you did not get your point across? Were you unable to convince someone to do something? Have you reached your full potential? Are you able to motivate yourself and others to achieve more and accomplish their goals? What about your relationships? Imagine being able to overcome objections before they happen, know what your prospect is thinking and feeling, feel more confident in your ability to persuade. Professional success, personal happiness, leadership potential, and income depend on the ability to persuade, influence, and motivate others.

By: Kurt Mortensen

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If you are looking for the most effective and the ultimate sure fire way of marketing, the answer is direct advertising. Direct advertising is perhaps the best marketing strategy there is today, simply because through direct advertising, products are directly marketed to a potential customer with the help of either a telemarketer or a sales person or representative.

While direct advertising has been around for quite some time, it was just until recently that the number of individuals who are trying to implement direct marketing techniques has significantly increased. Whether small scale or run by a conglomerate, local and international companies discovered how effective direct marketing is because of the “personal touch” that it has towards its customers.

As an online business owner, it is understandable if you aim to apply direct marketing methods. However, whether or not direct marketing works for you highly depends on what kind of online business you run and the kind of target audience that your products or services are after.

How effective direct advertising would be also depends on other factors such as the resources that you have available and how soon you access them as well as the financial extent upon which you are willing to invest on the direct advertising strategies.

It will also depend on which type of direct marketing strategy you wish to take up. Today, one of the most commonly applied direct marketing strategies is article marketing – it is a marketing technique where you let articles speak on behalf of your company or yourself; you let the articles “run the show” and serve as your “sales person”.

Article marketing can be done manually, where you submit the articles one by one to different article directories online. However, there is one way to make your article marketing endeavor a lot easier and that is through article marketing software.

Here are some tips on how to effectively market your articles using an article marketing software.

Make sure that the article that you write is relevant. If a fresh news came up and you know just the product or service related to it, do some research and write an article about it and end the article with a link pointing to your website. Just like the articles that you read in newspapers, your article should be timely and newsworthy. More readers will take the time reading your article if the topic is hot and interesting. Always make your articles viral - allow other people to publish your articles as long as they maintain the entire format and flow of the article and give you credit for it. Keep your articles short and simple. Long and complex articles will bore and lose readers along the way.

By: Jason Nyback

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