A Marketing Concept Often Misunderstood: Advertising

The Average Joe Phenomenon, Common Perceptions Of Advertising And Profits

If you asked the guy next door, given he’s not Seth Godin or Gene Simmons, they’ll tell you that the best way to get people to buy your product is by advertising it. They might even suggest you go and buy some ads on TV or in the local newspaper or maybe even the radio; and they’ll tell you that a lot of people will see it hence buy more of your product. People are still living in a world where they think they can make money and promote their business by simply advertising it…they’re wrong for the most part.

Yes, believe or not, you can still make a decent sum of money by advertising products or services; but why would you settle for one lolly in the candy store when you could have the whole store full? Advertising is a waste of money in many respects, you’re paying money for an advertisement where your conversion rate for turning viewers into customers is going to be very thin, as thin as 10% or less, that means you’re not getting value for every dollar you spend.

The marketing world is continually changing, it’s very dynamic, it’s not something you can always be ‘good’ at. It’s understood by many of the world’s best business brains that the way people live their lives is changing; and the only way to be a consistently good marketer is by having the skills to adapt to this changing environment. When you can adapt to this environment quickly enough, you’ll be a step ahead of the competition. The most important point to understand about all of this is that it’s not insanely difficult to be ahead of the competition - because most consumers are living in a world of their own, they’re under the influence of the average joe phenomenon.

Why Is This Average Joe Phenomenon So Prevalent In Our Society?

People can be really smart sometimes, and they can be really stupid as well. Let’s leave all the guerilla tactics for increasing that razor thin conversion rate when advertising a product alone. We’ll start off by looking at a family who enjoy watching television and grab the local weekend paper every Saturday morning. The mother and father are more interested in taking their kids to soccer practice than anything else; they do their regular 9 to 5 thing; come back home, feed the kids, get them ready to sleep. They really don’t know much about marketing or advertising. This is why false information seeps through to them and ironically word of mouth marketing take a wrong turn…

It’s obvious that someone, somewhere in their home started telling their friends to advertise; and advertise more to help their business grow. They see it being done on TV, in the newspaper etc…They automatically think - if so many people are doing it then it must work! It works, but it doesn’t work well. I’ll give families this though, they are becoming smarter, they can understand when an advertisement doesn’t work very well, and they don’t react to it at all. So, that’s a huge point against starting an ad campaign for your business; if it’s not a good advertisement, if it doesn’t convey a great message, if your ad is not remarkable, you can kiss those extra conversion rate percentages goodbye.

Seth Godin’s Insights About Permission Marketing and Interruption Marketing

Seth has a book called Permission Marketing, in it he explores several marketing concepts relevant to the society in which we live, as opposed the one twenty or so years ago (many people are still way back in their comprehension of successful marketing skills and techniques). Seth talks about the change in the way people respond to advertisements, on TV and the internet, he states that this type of marketing is called ‘Interruption Marketing’ and informs us that it is being responded to negatively by today’s generation.

Seth is right, and he goes on to talk about several other examples of interruption marketing present in our day and age. Why is he right? Simply because what he says is the truth. I know that whenever I go and watch television I’ll experience at least twelve or more ad breaks during the entire program…so you know what I do? I tune out, skip to another channel, go for a walk about, have something to eat until the show has started again. What lesson is this teaching you, apart from the fact that I like to eat? It’s teaching you that money spent on advertising is wasteful spending which will yield sub par results.

The Dot Com Bubble Burst, Many Companies Sunk But Some Sailed Through

If you go back twelve to fifteen years ago, you’ll find that people were paying crazy prices for simple forms of advertising on the internet. You had your pop ups, banner ads and other highly invasive forms of paid media. What happened at first? When these forms of paid advertising came out, it was a big thing, people were less knowledgeable, the internet was new to them; you could fool a large mass of people quickly and easily.

The problem arose when people started getting smarter, but it also came about as a result of the so called burst of the dot com bubble from 2000 to 2002. People soon realized marketers were trying to sell their products to them, get their attention and subsequently spam them; people started ignoring advertisements. The rise of technologies such as the pop up blocker materialized and advertisers started seeing a reduction in CTR and conversion rates (not only as a result of pop up blockers, but also as a result of people being less inclined to click on ads because they were ads). It was to be expected, the internet was a bit rough and ready then, people were less anxious about giving out their emails and more likely to click on ads.

Today, it’s a whole different ball-game, new age marketers (though very few exist) have realized people are reluctant to give out their emails. Marketers have seen that potential customers need to have a good reason to sign up and along with that reasoning, offering incentives is also a plus to grab their attention. People are basically polar opposites of the average user in 1998, tens years later, they are less likely to give out email and many can spot ads from a mile away and won’t even consider clicking on them.

Although the dot com bubble had burst; it was not completely deflated. There were various companies which battled it out in what seemed like a raging storm, a never ending fire, some businesses failed to ride the wave through; some persevered, fought the battle and saw profits increase gradually. We are now in the second dot com boom and many companies learnt a lot from the first one, no one can say if there will be a second burst of the bubble; but many people and organizations do make tentative predictions about the possibility of experiencing another one.

Still Want To Advertise? How Do You Succeed When The Odds Seem Stacked Against You…?

Advertising is not a useless tool, it’s just a tool which many people use in an ineffective way; hence a bad conversion rate for their products or services. People are smarter now, they know when they’re being pitched to directly, which is why marketers and internet marketers alike have had to resort to other methods to increase profit margins; and that all important viewer to customer conversion rate. In schools nowadays, we are still being taught what are titled as ‘the fundamental principles behind persuasive texts’, the problem is that what schools are teaching students is outdated information, which will serve no real purpose if the kid has prospects of developing a business in the future.

The most important factors to remember when beginning the development of an advertising campaign fall under three specific categories, message, medium, matter. The message is quite simply what you are trying to convey to the audience, medium is the way in which it is being conveyed and matter relates to why the person viewing or listening should continue listening; this involves giving the viewer or listener reasons to take action. In addition to the three categories mentioned above, advertising campaigns should be used in a medium where it is likely to have the best conversion and positioned at a time slot where people are most likely to respond.

There are entire books based on what a ’successful’ advertising campaign is and should be; the explanation above is a very brief, but highly accurate summary of the basic fundamentals required when modeling, refining and producing your advertising campaign. The reason why I still believe that there is more value in advertising or marketing on the internet as opposed to TV, radio and newspapers is because people are in their own comfort zone. They don’t need to get up, stop watching TV and go to find a web-site on their computers (not that they would); when they’re listening to radio, they forget most of the ads on it, unless a catchy jingle or funny phrase line is attached to the ad.

Success in advertising depends on the relevance of the ad to a specific group of people; and the likelihood that people are going to take action depends on how, when and where the advertisement is presented to them. The problem with television and radio advertisements is that people are not ready to take that action, they’re in the middle of watching something (hence Interruption Marketing, as defined by Seth Godin).

What’s Happening With Online Advertising? Is Ad Revenue Going Up or Down and Why?

The rise of internet activities such as blogging and easy web site creation has meant that more and more people are creating an online presence daily. There are some statistics that are truly staggering with respect to the amount of new sites and blogs created every single day. The internet or the world wide web is truly growing like never before, we have more people browsing the net and more people shopping online than there have ever been; and this is only likely to increase. Ad revenue is on the rise and will continue to rise as new sites and online properties are created.

Targeted Niche Market Advertising, The Key To Mastering A Successful Ad Campaign

The sheer amount of blogs and sites being created daily has led to an increasing presence in the amount of niche markets in existence online. This is where things get interesting; niche markets have three things going for it, that which you can benefit from: they are highly targeted areas of specific interest, they have a very loyal and supportive readership and they usually offer low cost advertising solutions. The amount that you pay at one of these niche sites is quite cheap in comparison to the amount you pay for advertisements elsewhere.

Since the readers of a niche market are already interested in other sites for that particular field, they know that the owner runs advertising; and that it is a fixed price advertising. Your CTR in a niche market will be considerably higher than in a mainstream media news site. This means that all you need to worry about is attracting those visitors to become your readers and future customers (which is easy enough to do if you offer RSS subscriptions via feed readers and email, a conversion form offering incentives is also very utile).

When Advertising Fails, Why It Does and How To Resolve This Problem

One of the biggest problems with advertising is that people don’t know how to use it effectively. This comes about as a result of many amateur campaigns which can’t really compete with other brands because the construction of their advertising campaign is not built on a solid foundation. When I talk about these ‘amateur’ campaigns, I am referring to the campaigns you see which don’t send out a strong message, the ones that haven’t really researched their market and the ones that can’t make a powerful appeal to a set group of people about their product or service.

Advertising can fail for many reasons, most of the time it’s because the person or group developing the campaign have decided on the wrong medium, the wrong message or the wrong matter or appeal for the advertisement. The single most important factor to consider separate from the three factors mentioned above is the choice of contextual and targeted viewers, if you are unable to find a large percentage people who are actively interested in what you have to offer; the advertising campaign will ultimately fail.

When Advertising Succeeds, What’s Done Right and How To Replicate Success

I present you with the TAO of advertising, Target! Analyze! Optimize! Welcome to your advertising success. Successful advertising is all about getting the right audience to see your product or service, responding to any questions or queries your audience may have and optimizing your advertisement and your product to meet your viewer’s (audience’s) requirements. People will make so many excuses to as why they don’t want or even can’t advertise. You’ll hear them saying things like I don’t have enough capital, I can’t get the right people to see my ad, even when I advertise, I never get more customers!

People say this because they haven’t taken the time to find out where their potential customers are, how to appeal to the potential customers and optimize their advertisement for maximum performance and conversions. If I want to get more readers to my site, where should I advertise? In my niche! I would start by going to other sites in my niche and buying the best converting ad formats in my niche; and this will help me to build my readership. When you’ve built your readership, then you can start crafting advertising for a broader audience and age group who might be interested in what you have to offer.

StumbleUpon and Facebook are fantastic outlets for developing a carefully crafted form of advertising specific to a type of audience. Why? It’s simple, they both offer highly integrated forms of advertising that allow you to get maximum exposure for your product. When I use the term ‘highly integrated’ I mean the form of advertisement doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and you’re not having to compete with other advertisers. StumbleUpon is great because you pay to advertise your site directly into their user interface, that means that as soon as they click Stumble they will see you site not as an advertisement but as what your site really is.

Facebook allows you to carefully target a select group of individuals in a specific age demographic twinned with the use of tags to identify the people who would be suited to what your product is all about (business, entrepreneurship, blogging, web design). Facebook advertising shines in the way it allows you to create an advertisement in very simple and easy to understand steps. Albeit not as integrated as StumbleUpon, it offers you a more targeted approach to advertising successfully.

The Future Of Advertising, Where It May Be Headed and What To Expect From It

I’m not your fortune teller, I’m not a psychic, but I can make some accurate predictions of what I think the future of advertising will be. We are witnessing a progression to more ’subtle’ forms of advertising, you’re starting to see cloaked forms of advertising, you have to look a bit closer to see that what seems like content is actually an advertisement. We’re all beginning to realize the importance of narrowing our target audience, targeting them in highly condensed niche markets and subsequently winning their support or loyalty for our products or services. I foresee that advertising will turn to making less grandiose appeals to an audience and start fine tuning their message, focusing on an effective medium and optimizing the possibility for target audience appeal to their product or service.

Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Advertising and Promotion |

Tags: advertising, business, dot com bubble, facebook, gene simmons, marketing, niche advertising, niche market, persuasive media, seth godin, stumbleupon

 Did You Enjoy Reading This Article? If Yes, Subscribe To My RSS Feed!

COMMENTS

Quick Comment Policy: Small Fish Big Money values the community contribution you make to the site, we ask that you make comments that add value to the post. This could be by means of sharing or relating to the post in one form or another, or providing your own opinions relating to the post topic at hand.

Spam Policy: In the interest of reducing spam and useless content, we ask that you refrain from using 'one-liner' style comments or comments created for the purposes of attaining links (they will be purged from the site during comment quality upkeep periods). Thank You For Your Time.