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.

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