Does Subliminal Advertising Work on Twitter Timeline?
By Vitun Sharma
We've all heard of subliminal advertising. Most of us have experienced it, somehow, and it is a fine line between really creative advertising and subliminal one. When we pass a certain fast food store and we feel the flavor of tasty food, we feel compelled to try it. When we watch a movie and we see actors drink a certain brand of juice, we feel the need to drink it too. Subliminal advertising is much more subtle than classic advertising and it can be used to incite all of our senses in order to create the need for the product or service. But does it work on Twitter timeline? Can an update on Twitter have an effect on our brain? As a marketer, do you know which buttons to push when it comes to twitter in order to create subliminal advertising that works?
Twitter is compressed information.
Unlike Facebook, where you can post a tremendous amount of information, Twitter allows you only a limited number of characters. This is the reason why information is more compressed on Twitter and advertising on this social network is based on finding the most interesting and eye-catching phrase that will make people want to know more about you. In other words, it is much more difficult to advertise on Twitter than on any other social network because you only get one shot. The principle of advertising on Twitter revolves on creating a certain buzz that will incite people.
Under these circumstances, in order to create efficient subliminal advertising on Twitter, you need a strategic mind and lots of research in order to see what incites people. Whenever we grow our network on Twitter, our timeline becomes a real boom of updates and, for that matter, so do the timelines of those who follow us. The question is if those updates can be done in such way that they hit a certain part of our brain and direct our purchasing behavior. This means subliminal advertising, of course.
The value of an insight.
In the advertising world, one of the most important words is insight. An insight is valuable information that tells you exactly which button to push in order to touch your consumers. An insight is not about your product, at least not in the first phase. An insight is about you consumer, telling you what your product needs to offer them in order to attract them. For example, have you noticed how chocolate usually melts in the summer, leaving you with sticky fingers and an unpleasant sensation? Well, if you own a brand of chocolate and tell your consumers yours doesn't melt like the others, you've gotten their attention. This is an insight: though nobody expressed they needed chocolate that doesn't melt because they knew chocolate usually melts, everybody would have liked to have that kind of chocolate.
Returning to advertising on Twitter, in order to reach that part of your consumer's brain in which they feel the urge to buy your product, you need to have a valuable insight. If you want to create effective subliminal advertising on Twitter, just post that insight which you have and you will get people thinking. And as thought determines actions, you will also get to control their purchasing behavior.
Research the human nature. Research your consumers. Research your competition.
Sometimes, great ideas just come to us from nothing. But most of the times, we need research. If you want to run effective Twitter campaigns, you need a deep knowledge of what incites people, what they secretly desire, what are the magic words for your target and how to stay ahead of your competition. Never underestimate the power of research for it truly is a spring of inspiration. Train your strategic mind, test your knowledge every day and create catchy, persuasive and valuable phrases that will help you grow your business with Twitter advertising.
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The Cold Truth About The Future Of Advertising
By Michael Saraf
Anyone with a Facebook account is quite familiar with the "ALS Ice Bucket Challenge." For those of you still holding out, "the Challenge" is an awareness-creating, fund-raising initiative that has been wildly successful in raising money for the cause. In the last month alone, "the Challenge" has raised over $40 million in donations. By comparison, there was $2 million donated over the same period last year. By any measure, this is success. It also gives us a glimpse at what the future of advertising could look like.
Depending on the source, we have gone from being exposed to approximately 500 advertisements per day in the 1970's to about 5,000 per day today. How many of the ads that you saw on this very day can you remember? I thought so. Now, how many of your Facebook friends' videos from today can you remember? I bet ALL OF THEM, and that's the point. It's not the magnitude of daily exposure that matters, it is what is registering in our brains that counts.
Today's economy is being driven more and more by this type of "Peer-to-Peer" initiative. We hear all the time that the best form of advertising is word of mouth, and that is exactly what this is. Our friends are advertising a message to us and our other peers, and we are responding. Social media advertisements are moving at the speed of a click, and thousands are on the other end to receive the message.
While these particular "Challenge" postings are free (anybody can do it!), it should be noted that paid advertisements on social media sites are very inexpensive. Ads can run all day, and for as little as a dollar a day. This isn't new, and in fact the delivery methods are changing about as quickly as they can be written about. As a company trying to promote goods and services, the choices can be maddening. The alternative of not participating in social media advertising? That can be costing you in lost sales.
If YOUR Company is spending thousands of dollars per trade publication ad, chances are that you are not even being provided with the sales lead information in a way that's meaningful and actionable. By comparison, the social media "pay per click" fee of (literally) pennies, comes complete with the lead information - directly to YOU. Tough to beat.
In today's social media vernacular, we "tweet" our messages, "pin" our pictures, and use something called a "hashtag" (I don't want to understand that one). Who knows what we will be doing tomorrow. The world is getting smaller everyday, and the word of mouth is getting faster.
If you are ignoring the ever evolving way in which advertised information is being delivered to the masses, you might as well stick your head in a bucket of ice water. More importantly, YOUR Company is missing out on great opportunities to greatly enhance your message.
Brand Performance is a company designed to offer Affordable Business Coaching to companies in the US and International Markets. We help companies increase their sales by strengthening their commercial presence, implementing cost savings practices, and taking market share. Visit http://www.mybrandperformance.com today to learn more!
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Small Business Advertising: Why You Need To Advertise In More Than One Place
By D. Baer
Is your business getting limited results from advertising? One place to look when this happens is how widely your advertising message is spread. Many businesses who face this problem tend to focus on only one form of advertising, therefore limiting their reach.
While it's not recommended that you have a large target audience, it is still important to have more than one form or venue for your advertising in order to reach your target market in multiple ways. The fact is that many businesses fail, in part, because they avoid widening their view and stay only with one type of advertising.
A lot of advertisers think that the medium on which their advertising is, in fact, just as important if not more important than the message they are promoting. So when you say that you restrict your advertising to Google AdWords, you are missing an entire population of prospects who are not looking for you there.
Let's talk a little bit about why you don't want to focus on only one form about advertising. Let's say you are focusing on billboards only or bus ads only or the newspaper display ads only... you don't get the attention of the people who aren't looking in those places. If your billboard ads are on three major highways and you will have the potential to reach an audience that never drives down those highways, well you're missing out on a huge opportunity. So you want to diversify the ways and the places in which you were doing your marketing in order to reach more people.
Small business owners, of course, are not typically marketing experts, and most of us rely on advertising salespeople to guide us through the best choices for where to advertise. The problem is, of course, that salespeople have a bias toward their medium and their platform. And so, lots of small, local businesses find themselves restricting their reach and only getting their message out to a limited audience.
These days consumers have so much competition for their attention that it now takes somewhere between three and twelve impressions of an advertising message before a prospect even remember seeing an ad. So putting an ad in that monthly paper 12 times a year, and nowhere else, is simply a waste of money for an advertiser. It's simply not the right investment unless you are running those ads as part a broader marketing and advertising plan on multiple platforms.
So what sorts of platforms should you consider? Rule number one is to go where your prospects are... so if you are marketing a retirement community, you, obviously, don't want to be taking out ads in children's magazines.
Here are a few possible platforms to think about:
• The Yellow Pages - Clearly nobody is going to the phone book any more, and most publishers have moved their services online. In some markets they provide valuable services and a great reach, but in others, they get very little traffic to their online properties. So do your homework before committing to this type of advertising.
• Direct mail and postcards can still be a highly effective way to market, but it depends on your goal, your budget, the type of targeting you're trying to do, and the offer you are making. Ultimately, postcards require repeat impressions, which mean you need to be mailing to the same address multiple times before you can expect a reasonable response.
• Online advertising can be far more cost effective than direct mail, and, on any platforms, like Google, Bing, and Facebook, you can target a very specific audience who is already looking for or has demonstrated interest in what you are promoting. In addition, online display advertising, or contextual advertising can be very effective at reaching a local audience interested in a particular topic. For example, a financial planner can advertise to people within a 15 mile radius around her office who are reading an article about retirement planning on the Wall Street Journal's website.
The point is that there are multiple ways to promote a brand, a service, and an offer, and the more places you are seen (repeatedly) the more success you will have at getting prospects to take action on your ads.
Small, local business advertising is easy to do when you have a strategy and know where you have the best chances of attracting prospects. Just don't shortchange yourself by advertising in just one place... and know what other mistakes to avoid. To help small business owners who are looking for help, I've prepared a report on 7 mistakes local businesses should avoid in their advertising. If you think it would be useful for your business, you can get access to it at http://baeronmarketing.com/7mistakes.
David Baer is a marketing consultant working with coaches, consultants, professional advisors, and small business owners on Internet-based marketing. You can learn more about his work at http://baeronmarketing.com
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Small Business Advertising: Why You Need To Target Your Message
By D. Baer
One of the biggest mistakes in small business advertising, is thinking that your business and advertising message will appeal to everyone. The fact is that when you try to advertise to everybody, you effectively advertising to nobody. Advertising messages that focuses on everyone are typically too watered down or even confusing for maximum impact. However, by pinpointing your target audience, you can be far more effective at connecting them through a relevant message that speaks to their pains and needs.
When targeting a specific audience, you want to take time to identify your ideal prospects. That is to say that you want to determine the characteristics of the people who you believe are most likely to buy your product or service. These characteristics, which are often called a "Customer Avatar," are vital when you are trying to sell your product a group or people. Age, gender, ethnic group, geographical location and income level are just some of the characteristics that advertising agencies and companies focus on.
Let's say you are selling athletic footwear. Different people might be interested in your products for different reasons. Some may be professional or competitive athletes, and are looking for the latest technological advances to help them compete. Others may be people who regularly exercise, and need good quality footwear for their workout. And still others may be simply looking for comfort or style in their purchase. That's at least four different target markets we've just discussed.
So how do you figure out the message that's going to be most effective at selling your footwear? Clearly one advertising campaign will not speak to all of these groups. That's why it's smart to determine which of the ones listed is the right target market to priorities for your business, and develop a campaign around their story and their needs.
Let's say, using the athletic footwear example above, that we decide to target people who exercise regularly. A message that addresses their desire to have high quality footwear to use during their workout routine will be far more powerful than one that says, simply "we sell great shoes." The more focused your message, the more success you will have in having your message resonate with the people you are trying to reach. And the better chance you will have at converting these prospects into customers.
So as you are considering your next advertising campaign, take time to think about who you are trying to reach with your message. Look to what you've done in the past, and, if necessary, fine tune it to better reach those who are a) most likely to buy, b) would make for the most ideal customers, and c) have the best chance of coming back for more in the future.
Of course knowing how to target properly is just one part of creating effective advertising campaign. For a complete introduction to 7 mistakes most local businesses make in their advertising... and how you can avoid them, download my free report at http://baeronmarketing.com/7mistakes. Remember that targeting the right audience is a vital part of building your businesses through your advertising. Don't overlook the power of this simple concept in your next ad campaign.
David Baer is a marketing consultant working with professional advisors and small business owners on Internet-based marketing. Learn more at http://baeronmarketing.com
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7 Advertising Mistakes Most Small and Local Businesses Make
By D. Baer
Advertising is crucial to the most small businesses, particularly small retail and restaurant establishments vying for the attention of consumers in medium to large size markets. And yet, most small businesses don't understand how to advertise effectively. There are many common mistakes that small businesses make in their advertising. Here we're going to take a look at seven of the most common mistakes that I witness on a nearly daily basis.
Mistake Number 1: Advertising to Everyone. By making your advertising message broad, and trying to reach anyone and every who sees it, you are actually marketing to no one. Solution: Target your message to a subset of the population, and your advertising will resonate with them more effectively, because they identify with what your business is about.
Mistake Number 2: Not understanding the true value of the customer. Most businesses look at the cost of advertising and think they need to recoup that full investment from the direct response of the ad. Instead, they don't recognize that new customers who come to them from an ad have a lifetime value that is greater than the revenue of their initial purchase. Solution: Recognize that customers have a lifetime value, and position your ads and business to maximize repeat purchases.
Mistake Number 3: Focusing on one format of advertising. The fact is that your prospects need repeat exposure to your message before they remember seeing it. Studies suggest that, depending on your industry, you need to have your ad seen between 3 and 12 times before it is effective. And if you only restrict your advertising to one format or one medium, you are missing out on the opportunity to be seen more often. Solution: Diversify your advertising across multiple formats.
Mistake Number 4: Creating week ads. If you don't have a great message or a compelling looking ad, people will not notice it. Ads need to make an impact in order to be noticed, and if you have a weak ad, you are simply throwing money away. Solution: Look for ads that make an impact on you, and emulate their structure.
Mistake Number 5: Having a weak landing page. If you are advertising online, and sending people to your website, be sure you send them to a relevant page that's congruent with the ad. And that page needs to be effective at telling the prospect what they need to do next in order to buy from you. Solution: Make sure you are sending your internet traffic to the right place on your website with a purposeful landing page.
Mistake Number 6: Cutting back when times are slow. If you are not doing enough business, that's the absolute wrong time to cut back on advertising, which, after all is a vital tool in generating more business. Solution: Budget advertising as one of your business's regular and necessary investments in order to remain relevant and grow.
Mistake Number 7: Not capturing your leads and following up. If you are sending visitors to your website, chances are they won't buy right away. By capturing the leads who come to your site, however, you have the opportunity to develop a relationship with them and educate them about doing business with you. This approach builds trust, and results in much higher conversions of visitors to buyers. Solution: Create a lead capture and follow up system on your website.
As you can see, nothing on the above list is all that difficult to put in place. By simply recognizing and avoiding these mistakes, you can put your business advertising in position to thrive. If you want more details on how to fix your advertising and build more effective campaigns, visit Baer On Marketing to download my free report on better advertising practices.
David Baer is a marketing consultant working with professional advisors and small business owners on Internet-based marketing. Learn more at http://baeronmarketing.com
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Small Business Advertising: Capturing Leads and Following Up
By D. Baer
One of the biggest mistakes I come across with small businesses, is the fact that they don't know who their prospects or customers are. But even worse, they don't know how to get a hold of their prospector customers when they want to communicate with them. Not collecting prospect or customer contact information is one of the biggest mistakes local advertisers make.
Why is it import to collect customer contact information? Well the fact is that most people who visit your website or come into your store are just browsing. Unless you capture their email address or some other contact information to follow up with them, you have no control over how or when they will engage with your business next. However, if you have a mechanism to collect their email address when they visit your website for the first time, then you have far more control over the entire marketing and sales process to come.
Capturing an email address can be as simple as providing an opt-in box for someone to join a newsletter. More effective yet, is to provide some incentive for them to join your email list, like a free white paper or video or even a discount coupon toward their first purchase. Providing an opt-in form in a prominent location, or even via a pop-up on your website (tastefully done, of course), can be highly successful in getting that casual website visitor to become a devoted follower and client.
But collecting the contact information is only the first part of the equation. It's what you do with their information after you have it which matters. That is to say you need to make sure that you are actually communicating with them once they provided you with their contact information.
One of the best ways to do this is through an email autoresponder. There are plenty of major email marketing companies who offer autoresponder services, enabling you to automate a series of follow-up emails to anyone who provides you with their contact information. The most effective way to use an autoresponder is through a series of informative, value-based messages, which help educate your prospect about your product or service... and how you can change or enhance their life or their business.
A follow-up email series is best used as a relationship building tool. Once you've established a relationship and have the respect and trust of your prospect, then you can start incorporating the idea of "buying your stuff." Like so many other scenarios where the Pareto principle comes into play (that's the 80/20 rule), it's best to provide 80% value and 20% selling.
Remember, one of the most valuable things that you can do to enhance your business is to remind and educate prospects about you and your business. If you have captured your potential client's email addresses, phone number, and/or physical address, you now have the ability to follow up with them over time. Don't make the mistake of not capturing leads or not following up.
David Baer is a marketing consultant working with professional advisors and small business owners on Internet-based marketing. For a complete introduction to 7 mistakes most local businesses make in their advertising... and how you can avoid them, download David's free report at http://baeronmarketing.com/7mistakes.
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Ways To Make Your Branding Better For Small Business
By Vishwa Patel
Branding and advertising go hand in hand. SEO and branding are closely knit and one needs to follow the right steps to ensure that the SEO or the branding campaign bring the desired results.
When it comes to branding for small business, research is a critical factor. As an SEO or branding company, it is essential that you first understand in-depth what your client is involved in, what they represent in the industry, what is their target audience and why do they want to enter a specific market. Research is the preliminary step and lays the foundation for the later steps.
The next thing to keep in mind is to never stop with the brainstorming process for creating different values. Branding is the nurturing of values. If you want that the target audience starts associating with your client's service or product, then creating the right values is critical. For instance, creating a value set of a someone who is kind, matronly, community-minded and warm. The lady is the ideal grandma who will bake cookies and cools the on the window sill and wait for her grandchildren to return from school and relish those cookies. These values have molded her character. It helps in associating what she idealizes or stands for.
This is the same logic behind creating values of the brand. With good values, your target audience will start associating them with the product or the service. With effective branding, there is a feel-good factor developed around the brand and it also helps in selling positive emotions. This makes the buyer nostalgic about the brand once they have used it. They are bound to return to the same brand every year.
When it comes to carving a result-oriented branding campaign, the copy as well as the headlines plays a critical role. Someone opines that headlines are more effective when they are long. According that person, headlines should be between ten and twenty words, if the promotional content is being written for the print medium. According to some studies, buyers have no qualms reading more copy if copywriters are writing more. Consumers have an insatiable desire to learn and understand more about the products that they want to buy. When they see a lot of copy in any promotional or advertising material, they are convinced that a lot of research has been conducted and the marketers have taken great efforts before launching the product.
For effective branding, creating a USP is critical. Differentiation is an integral part and this is reflected in the message. For instance, if there are ten brands of detergent soap in the market, it becomes critical how you are distinguishing your client's brand from others. When it comes to branding, it is essential to maintain a fine balance between hyping up the product benefits and being honest about your claims.
Branding is really an important part of any industry, Product and business now a days. People are conscious about that and trying their best to make it work for their business, product and industry. If you want to share more details on this topic than connect with us on http://thankscreation9.com
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