Small Space Ads.

Bruce Hall;

How to use small space ads (it's probably not how you'd think)  

When owners of small to medium sized businesses attempt to market their business by using the mass media, they can easily make fundamental mistakes due to their lack of marketing skills. 

 More often than not, they copy the ads they see from household brands, or they may make their ads similar to those of another small business, not knowing that they have themselves copied from the" big boys". 

 As a small enterprise, you simply do not have deep enough pockets to stump up hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote so called "brand awareness". 

 Don't do it, small and large businesses are like chalk and cheese. 

A Small business by its very nature will have a correspondingly small budget; you have to make every dollar of your advertising budget work hard for you. There isn't unlimited dollars in the kitty. 

 Your purpose is to make sales quickly, not wait months and years like the big players. 

A typical ad from a small business could be described like this; 

Headline: 

This would most likely be the name of the business 

Services offered, 

Contact information, 

If you’re lucky a call to action (call us now) 

 This type of advertising is known by most of us in the marketing industry as an “Awareness ad”. 

This type of doesn’t work very well at all.  In fact some weeks you would be lucky to get more value in business than the cost of the ad.  

The main reason that these ads don't work very well is simple; we don't notice them. Our brains have become accustomed to filtering them out. 

 We are bombarded with so many different forms of advertising on a daily basis that we develop”blindness" to them. And yet this is the most common type of ad you will see from a small business 

That was an awareness ad; the next type of ad I will describe is that of a Sales ad. 

A typical Sales ad might be described as one that is trying to sell an item (power tool, kitchen appliance, book etc) or a service right here, right now. 

With luck it may have a strong headline, there will usually be a contact address and several different methods of payment offered, usually credit card or check and a product guarantee. 

Sometimes testimonials, (book critics comments, previous satisfied customers) there may even be a special offer on the bottom of the ad offering a discount for multiple orders, or maybe a time limited offer. 

 This Sales ad will be more productive than the Awareness ad simply because of the fact that it will often have a "pulling" headline and a list of benefits and special features. 

 It will make sales, but because most of us don't like to buy a brand we are not familiar with, unless of course, it is at a very attractive price it will not have the potential to achieve the results that can be obtained from the most powerful type of ad which is called a prospect generating ad. 

I mentioned before that awareness ads and sales ads do not do well for the companies that use them, I don't mean that these companies won't be making a profit they will be, but it will be in spite of the fact their ads are not working well, not because of them.