Setting Goals For Your Advertisements

If you don’t have an idea of what you want to achieve with your advertisement, it’ll be difficult to determine how successful the ad will be. Setting goals is crucial to advertising because you have to measure its effectiveness and impact in order to make changes and create new strategy. Goals can vary from increased sales, product or service awareness, to more website traffic. You can find out if you are getting a return on your investment by laying out what you hope to accomplish with your advertising campaign. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Be specific

When setting your goal, make it something measurable. To make your goals specific, use numbers. For example, let’s say you want a $300 increase in sales for the month of June, generated by your print ad in the local news magazine. The key is to be realistic: goals may not be met by one ad or over night.

2. Track Sales

Create a spreadsheet so that when you start advertising, you can gauge how your sales are improving or going downhill. Start weekly tracking about a month before your ad runs to set a starting point average. During your advertising campaign, watch how your sales fluctuate. Leave some space for a post-ad period for those who may respond to the ad in the weeks following its publication. If you’re including a coupon in your ad, use a specific code to the ad that was published.

3. Track Awareness

A major misconception about advertising is that it produces immediate results. It is possible, but the most common result of advertising is brand awareness. We’ll save explaining how to determine what your brand is for another day. But for now, keeping track of this kind of increase is important because your ad could be working without you even knowing. Also, people want to know who you are before purchasing your product or service. Keep an eye on your social media sites for increased traffic during your campaign and watch for traffic to your website. Both are obvious indicators of increased brand awareness.

By utilizing these tactics, you can draw a reasonable conclusion about whether your advertising is working or falling flat of your expectations. Instead of going in blind, be smart about how you can advertise and get the most out of it by setting specific and measurable goals.

 

 

 

The Value of Print Advertising

In today’s “digital world,” it seems as though advertisers greatly underestimate the power of print simply because they are told it is a dying field. Although many print vehicles have disappeared, that doesn’t apply to all print media and it can be relatively easy to figure out which print businesses are still thriving. Advertisers may not realize how big of an impact print advertising can still make.

Target Audience

It’s not only the quantity of a medium’s audience that is important, but also the quality of the audience and whether they have an interest in a product. Also, It’s important to consider demographics. If the audience is mostly women, particularly mothers, it’s likely that they are the most active and influential buyers in a community. Furthermore, what is the income and house value of the audience? Is it on the lower end of the spectrum, or does this audience have more disposable income to spend on a product?

Circulation

If your business is located in a particular part of a city, your most prominent audience is that within a close radius of your business. The location and the size of the circulation also play a factor in the influential of print ad. It may be more expensive to advertise in a print publication that circulates to 50,000 readers in your area than one that only circulates to half. That extra 50 percent of readers can dictate your visibility in the community and affect the exposure of your business in your operation area.

Purchaser Influence

Evidence suggests that print ads are more potent sales tools than digital ads. Gardner Business Media reports:

“A study, conducted in 2012 by Dynamic Logic on behalf of the Magazine Publishers of America, measured the total increase in purchase consideration/intent for a variety of products. The results? Television [ads] accounted for a 30% increase, online [ads] tallied 13% in increase, but, dramatically, magazines represented a 56% increase. In other words, magazines blew the other two media away in driving positive shifts in intention to buy.”

Print magazines also hold value to purchaser influence because of its long shelf life. It’s not just a fleeting moment on a web page, but a tangible item that has the potential of pass-along circulation.

Credibility

Print seems to be especially effective when correlated with a particular news source that is regarded as highly credible. A research report by the Online Publishers Association found that the credibility of a media company’s content carries over to the credibility of the advertising on their site. Consumers who are loyal to branded media sites are 50 percent more likely to purchase from advertisers on these sites. Ads that appear on a trusted newspaper or news magazine website are perceived as more credible and reputable.

These are just some of the reasons why advertisers are still recognizing and taking advantage of print advertising. Now that you know all that print advertising has to offer, consider incorporating this medium in your next advertising push.

 

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