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Are you a business owner representing a product or service? What's your point of differentiation? What separates you from your competitors? Is it quality? Is it the price? Is it the packaging? Is it placement or promotion? The bottom line is are you selling? If not, why not? The answer may lie in advertising.
They say nothing happens unless you advertise. No advertising = no sales. But many business people are leery of paid advertising because it just doesn't seem to return the investment. There are many reasons for this—throwing out spotty advertisements, whether online or offline doesn't work well most often and who can afford to advertise en masse regularly? People are desensitized by hyper advertising on TV, radio, Internet, junk mail, magazines, etc.
People are getting smarter and tuning advertising out—people are getting tired of the Wall Street advertising mentality that has spurred so many books and college courses. As a result, big business advertising focuses on higher and higher volumes of repetitive mass advertising to beat their message into the fewer and fewer minds still receptive to this kind of junk noise. Don't believe me? How do you REALLY feel about advertising you see or hear? Are you sick of it? So are 300 million other people. But what are the alternatives for communicating your offer?
Advertisers are very creative little sneaks who try all kinds of angles to fool you into not realizing you are being advertised at—they cloak advertisements into “infomercials” and now they cloak infomercials into looking like some PBS interview. Buzz words like “info-ads” which are designed to highlight the problems you didn't know you had (like Ezine articles) and set forth-easy solutions to complicated problems if you only “buy now”. And you can read article after article, book after book and the bottom line remains the same—the only people making money advertising are the ones selling advertising.
And do you realize the product or service you offer really doesn't matter when you advertise? You can take all products and services in the world and put them into two big piles: The GOOD products and the BAD products. Keep in mind that a good marketing team can sell bad products but a bad marketing team cannot sell good products. And what is the definition of a “bad product” anyway? The definition for a bad product is when people send it back because it sucks and they want their money back. If your product sells and you don't get a return or a compliant then, for all practical purposes you have a good product. Why isn't it selling then?
People have a tendency to blame the product if the advertising doesn't sell it. But if you have a good product and run an ad and nothing happens how can you blame the product? The product is inert. It's just sitting there waiting to be sold. It's not the product fault. It's the ADS fault. So you can simplify your life by eliminating the “product problem” mentality and wrap your mind around the fact you have an advertising problem instead. Which takes us back to the beginning of this article.
Point of differentiation—what's the point of differentiation of a paper clip? Keep in mind that paperclips are a competitive billion-dollar industry.Okay, here's the bottom line to this article—if you are not having any luck advertising your product online and can't afford mass advertising then a really SIMPLE solution is to use Off-line classified ads in newspapers. These ads are cheap ranging from $10.00 to $50.00 depending on the location of the newspaper and readerships/subscriptions. But there is no better place to spend advertising dollars if you are on a small budget. You are going to make mistakes when you advertise as you hone up your headline and hook to get people to take action and you can do very specific tests in various markets to gauge classified advertising response.
Do you have a website? Take a cue from Travelocity.com, PriceLine.com and other big players on the Internet—they all advertise conventionally—on TV! Why? Internet advertising sucks. We have a business kit called “Advertising Works” which is a very carefully constructed manual on writing effective classified ads to drive people to your website. It shows you how to write ads but more importantly it shows the entire U.S. market and how classifieds can be used to drive the market to your website cheaply by reducing the amount of type in the classified advertisement so they only cost a few dollars. For example a classified ad could read as follows: ADVERTISING WORKS! www.smart67.com and that's it! CHEAP AD! No phone, no hype, just a headline and a website address. The goal is to test headlines. Test, test, test! Check it out…
Copyright © 2006 James W. Hart, IV All Rights reserved.
Article Source :http://www.bestmanagementarticles.com
About the Author :
SBS is an online information resource for people that is focused on real estate and business solutions. Our site offers books, kits and ebooks in conjunction with high quality link portals to a variety of important sites. Visit us at http://
smart67.com
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