Market Segmentation and Print Advertising
The single most effective way to improve your return on investment for print advertising is by carefully selecting to which customers you send your materials. This process is referred to as market segmentation and involves defining your most lucrative customers in terms of their demographic information. Once well defined, you can either only market to specific customers or develop print advertising campaigns for each market segment. (more…)
7 Easy Techniques for Increasing Catalog Sales
Well designed print catalogs make people want your products. When readers see glossy pictures of people enjoying themselves with your great offers, they want those items, and lifestyle, for themselves. Increase your catalog printing project’s productivity by using these seven simple techniques.
The Best Way To Incorporate Your Logo Into Your Brochure
An important point to remember when designing and printing brochures for your company or products is that branding helps to establish your identity. A great looking brochure might sell a product, but it may not keep your customers coming back to buy more. A strong brand presence is also important to form and maintain a loyal customer base. Good products and services may go ignored without a strong brand identity.
Why emphasize your logo in your brochure and other printed materials?
It is important to tell your customer about your brand on all your products and communications. Whether it is on receipts, shopping bags, posters or brochures, your logo should be front and center. Some companies have an iconic graphic such as Adidas’ three stripes or a recognizable color scheme. Your logo and other identifying symbols should be used on all your printed materials in a consistent way. Your customer should be able to immediately identify your brand and remember it, so they can look for more of your products at a later time.
Creating a strong brand identity is crucial to maintaining your sales and developing a larger customer base. Great products are often not enough. Your brand’s name and image must be interesting and memorable to the customer. Your logo should cause the customer to make associations in his or her mind. It should stand for something more than just the products. Once you develop a great brand image, you need to make sure the customer remembers it with iconic images and logo designs. The best way to keep customers aware of your brand is to allow them to see your logo everywhere you can put it: in emails, on websites, on printed correspondence, on sales tags, and in advertisements.
How should you use your logo in your brochure?
Carefully Choose Your Marketing Colors
If you choose the wrong color for your marketing materials or Web site, it’s possible you could be turning potential customers away before they even read a word. There’s much psychology behind color, and knowing how to use colors to get the feelings you want people to experience will help you get the marketing results you want.
Understanding Color
All color comes from two basic colors: red and blue. Browns come from a mixture of both. Purple, indigo, green and others on that side of the color wheel come from blue. Orange, yellow and pink all stem from red tones. The eye focuses on blue colors in front of the retina, which means blue tones move away from the eye. This makes them seem non-threatening and can make people feel drowsy or relaxed. The eye focuses on red tones behind the retina, which means red tones move toward the eye. This makes red tones seem energetic, aggressive and excited.
Color Psychology
So, from how we see color, it’s easy to speculate that blue tones will make people relaxed and red tones will energize people. And that’s exactly what color studies have found. In one study that was featured on the ’70s show “The Human Body”, colicky babies in a hospital room lit by red lights cried more often and more intensely than when the same room with the same babies was lit by blue light. The researchers switched the lights of the room from red to blue and back again, and when the lights were red, the babies cried more than when the lights were blue. The blue lights actually quieted the room.
Blue shades and tones emanate feelings of stability, logic, relaxation and professionalism. A spa or a doctor’s office would do well to create a blue motif in their marketing materials. Since red tones get people excited, red would work well in marketing materials created for a sports items, money, motivating products and cars.
Of course, each color on the color wheel can produce different feelings. For instance, black is seen as a color of authority and seriousness. White implies cleanliness, which is why surgical gloves, and doctors and nurses wear a lot of white. (Notice white, blue and green scrubs and items in many hospitals? This combination produces a feeling of cleanliness and calmness.) You can check out more color meanings at InfoPlease.com or do an Internet search for “color psychology.”
As you can see, colors can mean all the difference in whether your marketing materials are read with an open calmness or a distrusted aggression. The right color for your marketing materials depends on your brand message and what you want consumers to feel. There is no right color for everyone, but there is a right color for your brand and your product.
3 Basics of Target Market Research
When it comes time for business owners and CFOs to cut budgets, marketing and advertising are often the first places they turn to. As a marketer, you need to be able to recognize why this isn’t such a good idea and be able to voice your reasons. It’s tempting for businesses to try to cut money from something in which they don’t see immediate results, but doing so could spell disaster for the business in coming months and years.
By evaluating how effective your marketing is, you can present a strong argument to the CFO about why marketing and advertising budgets are not where cuts should be made. Or, maybe you can at least lessen the cuts and allocate the marketing budget into areas that will prove to be stronger than others (like moving money into the successful direct mail budget from the unsuccessful billboard budget). But evaluating your marketing is hard to do if you don’t first do research into who makes up your target market. Once you know that, you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign more accurately.
Do Your Target Market Research
Traditionally, marketing involves four broad steps, which all have their own sub-steps: planning, creative development, execution and measurement. I’d like to talk more about the planning step, because I think it’s most important. Good planning sets the stage for the rest of your marketing campaign.
The insight you get from knowing your customers and their preferences will impact your marketing position and distribution channels, your media selection, the price of the product or service and your advertising offers.
Of course, researching your target market could go on for months, and can get as detailed as you want (and as detailed as you can afford!). But there are three absolute basics you must know about your customers:
Demographics: This consists of age, gender, occupation, education, income level, location and family circumstances (kids, single, married?). Lifestyle factors can also be included here. Do people have a long commute? Do they spend a lot of time outdoors? What roads do these people generally drive on?
Behavior: Is your target market full of people who love the outdoors? Are they spenders or savers? Do they like to watch TV or read magazines? What do you they like to do and what do they spend their money on?
Needs: What do they need? Why would they need your product or service? Do they know they need your product or service? Do you need to have late hours for those that work or can you be open during the day for stay-at-home moms? How can your product or service fulfill a need?
These three basics will help you create a rough sketch of what your target market looks like. Knowing these basics will allow you to create and product effective print brochures and color posters, choose the right colors in your logo and choose the right distribution channels for your marketing efforts. You have to know your audience before you can create a product or service that they’ll want to spend their hard earned money on.
Inspiration for Creative Ads
When it comes time to map out a new ad, whether for a billboard, brochures, a magazine spot or any other multitude of media, it’s hard to come up with something creative that people can just look at and instantly “get it.”
And creating a creative ad doesn’t automatically mean success. If your target audience doesn’t understand it, or if the content isn’t relevant, no amount of creativity will bring in sales. It’s easy for designers to forget that the purpose of the ad is to bring is sales when all they want to do is be creative. Likewise, it’s easy for the ad account managers to see the positive attributes of a really creative ad if they don’t see the sales potential right off the bat.
But, a creative and effective ad can be done. There are plenty of successful, creative ads out there that prove it. Get inspired by this Exposed SEO blog post that showcases 23 interesting, creative ads that don’t need to be contemplated to be understood. Many of these use the environment or an existing venue to play the ad off of (check out the bus exhaust coming out of a person’s mouth like cigarette smoke). Creative, clear and motivating.
And creative ads don’t only come from pros. Students show just as much, if not more creativity, in these ads on Advertnews.com. These feature an ad for Toblerone using what looks to be a bike rack and an ingenious, yet so simple, Windex ad.
To get a creative idea, you have to look outward, I think. Yes, inward is where the creativity flows, but you have to look outside yourself for ideas. And not stealing other ad ideas, but just looking at a tree and seeing it as a palette for something bigger, like a landing spot for a blown piece of gum (see the Exposed SEO blog).
There are four key elements of making an effective, yet creative ad:
1. It must be relevant to the customer.
2. It should contain a promise to the customer.
3. It should be well understood by the customer, yet not talk down to the customer.
4. Always put the product in the center of the ad.
Many creative ads get the creative part down almost too well, which means the product gets ignored. A number of studies have shown people remember a certain TV commercial, but they can’t remember what product the ad was selling. This is referred to as vampire creativity. If your ad is too entertaining or too involving, it obscures the product.
As you can see, there’s a fine line between being effectively creative and obscurely creative. By having your creative mind(s) working with the business-oriented mind(s), you have a better chance of achieving the right balance for a great ad. Teamwork is what it’s all about, just as in any other business.
Newsflash: Political Direct Mail Ads Are Negative
The Washington Post article “Direct Mail Ads Have Become Mostly Negative, Experts Say” caught my eye, what with me being in marketing. I must say I was disappointed when I read the article and it was all about political direct mail ads. No mention of politics in the headline, just something interesting that marketers and advertisers would all want to read. If I would have seen the word “political” somewhere in the article’s title, I would have thought, “yeah, what’s new?” Which I’m sure is precisely why the newspaper left it out.
But, hey, it’s still interesting to me even though I feel bamboozled thinking it was an industry-wide theme.
A review of 24 direct-mail ads sent from Obama’s campaign and McCain’s campaign shows a “below-the-radar battle in which the public message of the candidates becomes something more spiteful, more exaggerated and often more ominous.” The candidates are trying to get the swing states on their side, obviously. That’s where all of these direct-mail ads were sent to. The Democratic Party warned voters that McCain is “hiding something he doesn’t want us to know.” The Republican National Committee sent the message “Barack Obama: Not who you think he is” to 6 swing states.
Both candidates say the other is being unfair with all of the lies in the mailings, even as they approve their own direct mail attacks. Direct mail has a 30-year history of swaying voters late in elections, so it’s not likely that they are going to slow down in the next few days.
Direct-mail ads can be more alarmist, more negative because they aren’t produced for the masses. Direct mail is more focused, you know the neighborhoods and the way certain counties have voted in the past, so the direct mailers can choose a well-placed negative ad to give that county or that city the slightest push it needed to vote red or blue.
Direct mail has been used in campaigns since the late ’60s. And now it’s becoming more influential. Candidates feel like they can be more candid in direct mail because it’s proven to be less damaging to their image to attack through mail than on TV or radio.
The North Carolina Republican State Executive Committee sent out a picture of Obama next to the quote “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Most people would assume that Obama said that, but in fact it was Bill Ayers, a ’60s radical whom Obama later met in Chicago. Of course, the brochure didn’t attribute the quote. That’s just plain out lying if you ask me.
But, unfortunately, some court decided long ago that political ads were part of political speech. And political speech is covered under the First Amendment, so it’s okay to have lies in political ads. Is that ridiculous or what?
Obama’s camp has sent out flyers saying McCain’s campaign is run by “seven Washington lobbyists.”
The Wisconsin Advertising Project conducted a study that found that McCain’s ads are 74 percent negative while 60 percent of Obama’s ads are negative. (These numbers are for all ads, not just direct mail.)
And the reason they keep sending out the negativity? Because that’s what people remember. They don’t remember the good deeds. People don’t even want to hear about the good stuff; they just want to hear the bad. That’s why newspaper headlines are always negative; people complain, but negative headlines are what sell newspapers and are what people respond to.
How can we break this negativity cycle if that’s what the people want?
Ads That Make You Remember Them
What is it about certain ads that make you remember them? A great jingle? “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!”
Or is it a great saying: “Whassup?” The Budweiser commercial featuring the Whassup guys has been updated and remade by 60Frames, who makes original Internet programming.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmqCKtJnxM]
Now though, it’s turned political (surprise, surprise!). The commercial shows the same guys, but the economy has gotten to them and one guy is watching a political commercial or speech on TV. It’s a sad update of what’s taken place since the commercial aired 8 years ago. The thing is, even though I haven’t thought about that commercial for years, as soon as I saw “Whassup” I knew exactly what commercial was being referenced. So the first thing to make your ad memorable is to make up a word or someone change a word so that everyone wants to copy you.
There were no cute animals, like in the other Bud commercial with the talking frogs. Now, I’m not a beer fan, but Bud seems to have some pretty good commercials. The Bud-Weis-Er frogs came on the scene during the ’95 Super Bowl and ranks at #5 on the MSNBC list for best Super Bowl ads ever. So, include talking animals. That almost always works!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcbasIb8lQ]
The Federal Express commercial featuring fast talker John Moschitta Jr. is ranked #1 on New York magazine’s list of “The Most Memorable Advertisements Madison Avenue Ever Sold.” And isn’t Moschitta Jr. lucky – his fast talking got him at least 10 spots on VH1’s “I Love the ’80s” show. This is memorable because it still applies today to everyone’s “hurry up and wait” mentality. Plus, it aligns quite well with Federal Express’ brand. So, pick an idea that brings your brand to life. (If only it were that easy, right?)
And we love little old ladies who don’t act like little old ladies. Maybe you should add one to your next ad for some memorability. I’m sure you remember the old lady asking “Where’s the beef?” in the 1984 Wendy’s ad. I was just a little kid then and didn’t even know what Wendy’s was and I know that saying. “It’s arguably the best line in a commercial over the past 25 years,” says David Apicella, a vice-chairman at Ogilvy. When Homer Simpson repeats your slogan or quotes your commercial, you know you’ve got a winner!
Even though this is a logo and not an ad, I couldn’t leave out the “I [heart] NY” logo. And what about the “I [heart] NY” T-shirts that are still all the rage? I didn’t know the logo was over 30 years old, but believe it or not, it was created in 1977. And, it was created for free. That’s right, Milton Glaser created the logo for New York tourism for free. New York magazine says the logo “is among the world’s most recognizable, initially concocted to boost tourism to New York State as the city teetered on the brink of insolvency.” So that goes to show you that you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to create a great logo. Just give it a simple design with lots of meaning. You can do that, right?
4 Low-Cost Marketing Ideas
In a rough economy, the time to increase (or at least, maintain) marketing and advertising is now. I know it seems counterintuitive, but you need to keep up your presence with the public and your customers so that when the economy rebounds, they’ll be right there at your door.
Even if you have to cut back on your marketing budget, that doesn’t mean you have to cut it out completely. There are still many cheap marketing techniques you can use until you get more money in the bank. And these marketing techniques will be part of the reason why you get money in your bank – because you keep on marketing!
Here are some ideas you can use that won’t cost you thousands of dollars. Most won’t even cost hundreds of dollars!
Start a Web site or blog. You should already have a Web site, but if you don’t, now’s the time to start one. If you do have a Web site, you should start a blog. You can get them for free from Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. There are plenty of other blogging sites, but these are the most popular and easiest to use. Blogging is a great way to build a relationship with your customers and prospects because you can start a conversation with them.
Participate in forums. Here’s another free way to get online. You can give out your expertise for free on forums and direct people to your Web site. People like to buy from experts. Also, you get a dialogue going with customers, who will get to know you, and then want to be loyal to you and your business.
Give something away. Something else that seems counterintuitive, but what you give away doesn’t have to be expensive! It just has to have value for the customer. If you have an auto repair store, you can give away an inexpensive tire gauge. A dentist could give out a free teeth cleaning (which is how I found my current dentist!). Give away something that is low cost to you, but is of high value to the customer. That will get them in your store so that you can build a relationship with them. And that’s what it’s all about.
Host a charity event. If a charity is looking for a venue, what better place than your store! If you don’t have the room, sponsor something in the charity event. A DJ could provide the music for free, or a caterer could provide the snacks or dessert for free. This gets your name in the program or on a sign at least. You could also provide a door prize or a bigger prize in lieu of holding the event at your place. Get your name in there somewhere! People like to do business with companies that help out charities.
Remember that customers buy from people they know and trust. That’s what your marketing campaign should do during tough times – remind people that they can trust you. You probably have many competitors with similar products, so establishing a relationship is key to having people spend their money with you over your competitors. Competing on price alone won’t work, even in a recession.
Simple Tips To Creating a Killer Classified Ad
For you to be able to achieve success in business, 4 things must not be neglected:
A great product/ service
A decent ad copy
The right targeted market
Repeat!
When you are out to explore avenues in marketing for your business, one of the core basics is to have a good ad copy. Once you are sure that your product or service has been perfected for a release in the market, it is vital that you put up an ad that is “unmissable”. Most businesses already know this, right? But do they know the ingredients for an excellent classified or ad copy that can show results. NO! The following tips shall give you insight as to how wonderful classifieds can be created for a deeper impact on your audience:-
Any classified in the world has to have 3 basic things in it:-
The Heading
The Body
Call to Action
Let’s take a closer look at how all of them can be effective!
The Heading: This is the single most important factor in an ad. Headings are the first thing that will strike your audience’s attention. Ether it will grab enough attention that they go ahead and read the rest of what you have to say or just step out of it without bothering at all. So make sure your heading has some strong words / symbols depending upon the space you have. Only if there is a spark between the ad and the customer, will he move forward to take an action. It should be strong but also believable. Some examples:
“Earn $5000 from your home, now!”
“Save $X on daily shopping”
By the end of your heading, you must have created enough interest in the customer that he reads the rest of your ad. Once you get this done, have the work is over!
The Body: This part will explain and expand on what you have offered through your headline. Make sure you don’t stuff it with a lot of heavy nerdy terms and words. This might take off the interest of your potential customer. Try not to exceed more than 25 words. Apply the KISS rule: Keep it Simple, stupid! What makes it worse is the use of abbreviations. Try not to use them as your message should come across very clear. If our ad has been designed well, it will provoke the customer to make the next move.
Call to Action: This is the final stage of your ad. It is the last line of your ad where the basic motive is to provoke the reader into taking an action. This can be achieved easily with coupling your contact information with action words. To get a solid response, you must put some use some action words like “call now” along with your telephone no. or web address. It has been researched a no. of times and has been proven, that for customers to respond or react to the ad, they must be enticed with the help of words. Some foolproof examples like these can really work :-
“For FREE information, call now! 1-800……”
“Call Toll-Free! 1-877….”
“Visit our website for a free demo of….”
Remember the purpose is to invite your potential customers to try out what you are offering if not ordering at all. To achieve this, you can also apply one of the oldest strategies of all, which is to give out a special offer or a discount. When people realize that NOW is the best time to call, they will do it, at least pay a visit of not much. For better results, make the offer a “limited time” one or a “week only” offer. Mission accomplished!
Apart from having great content on your classified ad, it is vital that it is published at the right time and at the right place. Make sure you use your local directories well. There are plenty of options available. Buying a space in the local yellow pages in bulk can save you a great deal of money. Following these tips before printing your ad can double your response in no time.
Article written by Mark
