Monday, January 21, 2008

How Does Your Ad Look?

This is Continued From Yesterday. Today, let's discuss the best day out of the week to run your ad.

How to determine the best day to run an ad:

There are a number of business people that run ads when their not there. What good is that? So first thing we need to do is to run an ad when your business is open. This is a simple thing to do, but incredulously it is frequently overlooked.

If you are going to put an ad in the newspaper, than the following is how you should Target your market.

Let's start with Monday. Monday's sport section is where people like to see how their favorite teams did on Sunday. Anything to do with the man in the house should be advertised on that day in the Sports section.

The middle of the week...Wednesdays according to my ad consultant is the time to advertise anything that has to do with food or specials that your business may be running.

Fridays, what do most people say?; TGIF. The singles are looking for the bars and the older people such as yours truly looks in the papers for my favorite action flick. That get's me looking in the Entertainment section of the newspaper. I also see a lot of ads for Electronics.

I know that when I use to do advertising in my local paper Sundays had high readership so you are going to be paying a higher price than the other days. The thing you need to do is test a Sunday ad to make sure it translates into more sales for you than the rest of the week.

I remember running an ad that was 8x11, about the size of your normal flyer. Guess what? since it was in color I already had some good graphics for circulars and customer handouts. I mean you pay a good price why not make as much use of your ad as possible?

I have see people outside stores hired by the owners handing out to would be patrons their ads all day long. Without fail the owner tells me it works really well. People see something that peaks their interest and checks it out. Should they not buy the item that brought them inside the store, odds were they usually made another purchase that was totally unrelated to the circular/flyer.

The best way to advertise is to always target your market. For example, if you are going to advertise desks and office supplies, who often buys those items? Of course you say, business people. That is why you advertise in the Business section of the newspaper, or even in a business paper if you have one in your City rather than the major newspaper. If you are going to run discounted items, you might look for a shopper type of newspaper...Penny saver, Thrifty Nickel etc. The whole concept here is to test and market. Than if that works well, roll it out to other Papers in your area.

Talk with your advertising consultant regarding testing the market. This is of extreme importance with any advertising campaign. There is a lot to learn here, so you need to do your homework.

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