Small Business Marketing Idea – Stop Making Your Ads Invisible

In this age of advertising overload… where people are being bombarded by hundreds of messages a day… having your advertising blend in with other ads is the last thing you want to do. It’s just too easy for a potential customer to overlook your “camouflaged” ad. Yet camouflaging their ads is exactly what most businesses do. They follow exactly what everyone else is doing.

One of the primary ways most businesses market themselves is through the use of display ads in newspapers, magazines, or yellow pages. A display ad is simply an advertisement in a box that could be any dimension, but is determined by the standard sizes for a particular media. In addition to having ads that blend in, almost all display ads are being done all wrong. At the very top of the ad is the business name, or logo. Under that they have bullets highlighting features of their business followed by contact information.

First of all, never waste the top of an ad with your business name or logo. While this may sound harsh, customers just don’t care about you yet. All they care about is what you can do for them. So tell them up front! Use a powerful headline to capture their interest.

And while the bulleted feature list does give the reader information about what services you offer, just about every other ad has the exact same information. These bullets don’t tell potential customers how you stand out from everyone else. Give the reader benefits of going to your small business versus going somewhere else. Even if there are no real differences, just pointing out the benefits of using your business is different than anyone else is doing.

And finally, don’t just put your phone number at the bottom. Give readers a call to action and include some way you can track that they came to your store through this ad. Use something like: “Bring this ad in today for a free month of mailbox service.” Then keep track of these results so you know how effective your advertising is.

Improving your display ads and all of your marketing lets you build the kind of business you want. With effective marketing you can bring in not only more customers, but the kind of customers who don’t consider price to be the most important thing.

For many small businesses, Christmas is the most profitable shipping time of the year. By implementing the right marketing strategies now, not only can you make it even more profitable, but you can extend that profitability throughout the year.

Now is the time to start getting your advertising campaign ready to launch. Get some display ads ready to run in the local newspapers your customers read. You want to let people know about the benefits you have versus going to your competitors so be sure your ads effectively convey those benefits. You may even want to partner with a charitable event such as “Toys for Tots” to get people coming in your business to drop off toys.

The problem with most advertising is that it is copies other advertising…and most of it is bad, boring, or it blends in with other ads. Instead of following the herd, run an advertisement with a headline that says something like, “Seven Reasons to use “Your Business Name Here” Instead of [Whatever The Alternative Is]”. Or run an “Advertorial,” which is a cross between an advertisement and an article. Take some time to learn how to make your ads stand out and get noticed.

Also make sure you can track the effectiveness of the ads you’re placing through the use of coupons or some other method. As a small business owner, you shouldn’t advertise by any method you can’t track.

After you get people to come into your store once, how do you make sure they come back so you can extend Christmas profitability year round? The only real way to do that is to capture their contact info. That way you can cost-effectively market to them all year. Once you have their contact info you can send them postcards, or if you get their email address you can use automatic tools like email autoresponders. Then your marketing campaign is on autopilot and it goes out no matter how busy you get.

To capture their contact info you’ll need to run some sort of giveaway so they sign up to win it. With all the traffic coming in to your store over the holiday season it may be worth it to you to give away a portable digital TV or something else people really want.

Now is the best opportunity you’ll have all year to dramatically increase the profits of your store all year round. Don’t waste it! Take action now!