The Single Most Important and Overlooked Advertising Mistake Made Even by Professionals

Spending on advertising has been estimated at about $200 billion in the US alone. Worldwide, this figure is estimated at almost 3 times more. While this spending has been growing dramatically, the ROI (Return On Investment) has actually been falling! Less than 5% advertisers claim to have a successful return for their advertising expense. While most people think that this is largely due to increasing competition, it is actually a very minor responsible factor. There are several mistakes that advertisers make that can actually be avoided, which I’m about to reveal to you. But first, let’s look at the key elements to consider before you even start an advertising campaign:

1. Research: You first need to research what advertising strategies you wish to use (and also check out what is currently being used by your competitors). You need to check where and how they are advertising, how much are they spending and which of the campaigns are they maintaining consistently. You should also check out ads in other markets and evaluate which of their ideas can be used in your market also. Remember, the style changes but principles remain the same.

2. Ad Planning: Once you’ve done your research, you need to plan how you wish to go about it. Don’t just blindly copy someone, but emulate them. How you can do something better. How you can be different. Identify your USP. Work on the content (copy writing). Create several advertising modules. If you’re not competent at some things (like copy writing), outsource it.

3. Budget planning: If you do not plan your budget in advance, you will end up spending more than you should, which can be disastrous. Or you will spend less than what you should and give up before giving a campaign its necessary time.

4. Targeting: Most people blindly advertise their products or services in a medium without giving much thought to the ad recipients. You really need to create an avatar of your ideal customer and then target them. This is the best way to get maximum ROI. Don’t think that your products are required by everyone. Find out where they have their eyeballs on and then get in front of them.

5. Offer creation: Ultimately, your conversion boils down to only one thing – your offer. The idea is to create an offer so irresistible, only a fool would pass it up. A word of warning here – Remember to justify your offer by giving a reason why such an offer has been created. You don’t want people to become suspicious and make it sound like a scam.

Now let’s discuss advertising mistakes. The most common mistakes that an advertiser makes are "not considering the above 5 elements". But the most important and overlooked mistake advertisers make is “not constantly testing, measuring and tracking the return for each advertisement”. This is really huge. You should constantly measure the effectiveness of each campaign. If something is not working, modify just one aspect of the ad and re-measure it. If it still works out unproductive, drop it and jump on the next. You may also want to test successfully converting ads by modifying a little and re-measure the conversions. If you can increase your ROI, then make it as your new starting point and re-modify one aspect. If conversions decrease, you can fall back to your original ad.

It is also vital that you track your ads properly. As an example, let’s say you create a newspaper ad and give it in 3 newspapers. Suppose the response was not so good and you end up breaking even. However, there are good chances that the response was better in one or two papers. If this is the case, it makes sense in continuing the ad in these papers (assuming that the costs of ad in all three are equal). So how do you know which ad to continue? The answer is – track all of them. So when someone responds to an ad by calling you, you should first ask which newspaper ad did he come across? If this is not practical, you can have different telephone numbers for each ad. If this is also not possible, you can simply mention to ask for a particular name in the ad. Have 3 different names for all 3 papers. If you don’t have 3 people to attend calls, give fictitious names (but remember this when someone calls; you don’t want to hang up thinking it’s a wrong number!). The basic idea is to track all responses and monitor conversions.

I hope you found this article useful. For more free advertising tips, please visit http://www.bharatbhasha.com/advertising.php. I’m sure you’ll find many more tips, which would otherwise be practically nonviable to cram into one single article like the one you just read.