Advertising is a communication intended to convince a viewer, reader or listeners to act. Most, but not all, advertising includes the name of the product or service and how that product or service could benefit the buyer.

The first step you can take is to locate where you will be doing the majority of your business...

Commercial advertisers seek to increase the sale of their products and / or services through branding, which involves the repetition of an image or product name in an effort to associate qualities of the brand in the minds of consumers.

The media used to communicate includes traditional media such as

• newspapers,
• magazines,
• television,
• radio,
• outdoor or
• direct mail

It now includes new media, or digital messaging, such as

• the internet,
• websites,
• computer multimedia,
• computer games,
• CD-ROMs and DVDs and
• text messages.

Advertising may be placed by an advertising agency on behalf of a company or other organization.

Non-commercial advertisers that spend money to advertise items other than a consumer product or service include political parties, interest groups, religious organizations and governmental agencies. Non-profit organizations may rely on free modes of persuasion, such as a public service announcement.

Planning

Ask yourself the following four key questions when planning your ad campaign:

• What do I want my advertising to accomplish?
• Who should my advertising speak to?
• What should my advertising say?
• What advertising medium should I use?

Each question can have a number of answers, depending upon the specific business situation. Explore the full range of possibilities; you may need several advertising strategies for your particular business.

You want advertising to increase awareness of your business, develop the loyalty of your current customers or generate sales or sales leads. You may want it to do all of these things. What's important is to prioritize your goals. Advertising works best when it's developed to meet one goal at a time.

Once you determine your goals, you can target the right audience to receive your advertising messages. "Mass market" advertising rarely is successful. Have a specific customer type or group in mind when developing your ads.

Ads should be written to communicate a message that your target audience considers important. Stress the benefits of your product or service and keep AIDA in mind:

• attract Attention,
• hold Interest,
• arouse Desire and
• motivate Action.

In addition to the "traditional" print and broadcast media, there are dozens of other options for placing your ads -- from kiosks to web pages to billboards. The important thing to remember about placement is to go where your targets will have the greatest likelihood of seeing or hearing your ad.

Your choice of media should fit your advertising goals, effectively reaches your target(s) and is cost-effective. While getting the maximum number of impressions per ad dollar spent is important, what is even more important is that the right people see your ad. You may be better off, for example, running a larger, more expensive ad in a highly targeted trade publication whose readership is made up of your targets, than running a small ad in a larger circulation publication that may or may not have readers which fall into your target category.

It may also be time to consider having a professional -- either an independent contractor or advertising agency -- help you plan and execute your ad campaign. While you will pay for their services, they can help you refine your advertising goals and strategies, plan your media placements and write highly effective ad copy designed to achieve your objectives. There are many trade and industry associations that can point you to highly reputable people who specialize in your business area.

Choosing the Right Advertising Medium

Advertising can be an excellent promotional tool enabling businesses to build awareness and inform a wide range of potential customers about their products or services. However, it can be expensive and it is difficult to evaluate its effectiveness. Many small business owners struggle to decide how to choose which advertising medium to use. Instead of carefully planning their marketing investment, they accept the first apparently good 'deal' that comes their way with no indication as to whether that medium will bring the results they had hoped for.

Before you choose to invest in any marketing medium, step back and ask yourself five basic strategic marketing questions. The answers to these questions will help you select the marketing media that will give your small business the best return on your investment. The five key questions to determine your optimal marketing mix are:

What is your target market(s)?

This question sounds simple enough, but it is crucial that you have a very clear notion of who you are targeting the advertisement towards before you can choose the right type of media. It is pointless using local newspapers to advertise the latest designer clothes if most of the readers are pensioners and unlikely to be interested in such products.

To get a good feel for who your best target market(s) is, you should start by analysing who your customers are, and draw some conclusions about who and what type of person is already buying, or will purchase from you in future. For instance, you might find that lawyers make up a large part of your customer base. This might lead you to consider investing in media that specifically targets lawyers, such as local legal newsletters, targeted lawyer mailing lists, or sponsoring opportunities for legal clubs and associations.

What media does your target market watch, listen to or read?

Once you have determined who your target market(s) is, the next step is to do some research into what specific media they pay attention to. The best way to find this out is simply to ask the names of the publications they subscribe to, the associations or groups they belong to, the radio stations they listen to, the television programmes they watch, or the type of mail they open and read.

The vast majority of small business owners only consider obvious media options such as the newspapers, radio and television stations however, you can also find inexpensive advertising opportunities in local community bulletins, professional newsletters and targeted direct mail lists.

Don't dismiss opportunities to advertise in newsagents' windows or in local community magazines, as both can provide cost-effective ways of reaching your market.

The reason that many business owners don't discover these less well-known advertising opportunities is because it requires a concerted research effort. Further research to establish where your competitors do and don't advertise will also provide useful information.

Which media can extend your message to the most people in your target market per marketing dollar?

This is perhaps the most important issue for the small business owner and to resolve it you require a method of comparing the relative marketing investment of one medium with another by using an objective tool to measure what you get for your marketing dollar.

A commonly used media-buying measurement is the 'CPM' calculation. CPM stands for 'Cost Per Thousand' (from the Latin 'mille') people that view or receive your advertisement. The CPM calculation allows you to break down your media investment into cost per 1,000 'exposures'. For example, if your airtime for running a local radio spot costs $500, and the radio station's data shows that 45,000 people matching the age of your target market audience are listening during the time period you're considering, then you would calculate CPM as follows:

CPM = $500 (advertising cost) / 45,000 (people exposed to your ad) = $0.011

This means that you are paying just over a cent for every person who is exposed to your advert. You can use this tool to analyse each media package you're considering.

Every medium has viewing statistics. For example, newspaper and magazine viewing statistics are expressed in terms of 'circulation' or 'distribution' numbers, and television and radio figures are expressed in terms of 'rating points'.

Most newspapers and magazines publish media packs giving information about the publication, including advertising rates, the numbers of copies sold (circulation), actual readership and reader profiles. You can also obtain a rate card, which gives prices for different types and sizes of advertisements.

Media packs are useful not just because they provide hard data on costs of advertising and readership statistics, but because they can help you to judge whether the image of the publication is right as a vehicle for the promotion of your business, and whether or not its readership fits your customer profile and target market.

If the media you are considering doesn't have a way for you to determine CPM, you should think twice before investing in it. You should always have a way to determine your media buying power objectively.

What are your advertising objectives and how well does this medium help you to accomplish them?

Using the CPM calculation helps to answer which medium can extend your message to the most people per marketing dollar, but it still doesn't answer the question of how effective it will be to meet your advertising objectives. Therefore it is important to be clear about your aims and to distinguish between strategic objectives - which aim to raise awareness of your business and develop image over the longer term - and tactical objectives, which aim to encourage specific market segments to buy a certain product or service, often at a specific time.

You should determine what your objectives are at a very early stage.

• Do you want more people to visit your shop?
• Do you want potential customers to ring a telephone number?
• Do you simply want more leads or do you need to generate more hits to your website?

You should decide exactly what you want to get out of the marketing activity and match this to the media that can best achieve it.

If you want to advertise a time-sensitive special promotion, you only need to consider media that allows you to develop the advertisement and promote it in a very short timeframe. If you only want to advertise to specific neighbourhoods you should narrow down your choice of media to those that allow you to pinpoint those target areas. Local newspapers could meet both of these objectives.

Determining what your advertising objectives are, and only choosing media options that help you meet them, will quickly help you narrow down the best media choices for you.

How well will this medium allow you to measure the return on your marketing budget?

It's the 'return on your marketing dollar that counts the most. Never choose a medium or develop an advertisement that doesn't allow you to track precisely and calculate your results.

Don't make the mistake of relying on asking your prospects where they heard about you. It has been demonstrated in studies that people can't accurately tell you where they heard about you and if you rely on this type of information to allocate your marketing budget, you might be making a big mistake.

In the end, if you can't accurately measure the response to an advertisement, you'll never be able to track it. If you can't track it, you'll never know what media is working for you and what isn't. If you don't know what media is or isn't working for you, you're probably wasting a lot of money on media that simply doesn't work.

These five basic steps will help you narrow down your media choices, but you should also think about your product or service and how the type of advertisement you are planning will work. The only way to judge the right media is through trial and error and you need to test and test again, so always start small to minimise potential losses. You should also give some thought to:

The nature of your unique selling proposition (USP): a balance must be struck between the type of media image you want to portray and the product or service you are selling. The type of advertisement you choose must also be able to convey the correct appeal.

Complexity of the message: try to avoid overly complicated advertisements.
Competition for audience attention: is there too much noise or clutter in the type of medium under consideration? If so, will this distract audience attention?

Internet advertising for small businesses

The boom in the number of people using the Internet and the availability of high-speed connections have made the web an increasingly popular advertising medium. However, as with any marketing campaign, you must have clear objectives for what you want to achieve. Many businesses, including large firms, have simply gone online because they wanted to jump on the bandwagon. To achieve the most effective results from Internet advertising, you should consider:

Search engine optimisation, which is the process of promoting your business online to achieve a better search engine ranking for certain key words and phrases.

Affiliate online marketing is a system whereby one business' website is promoted on the site of another business whose owners have decided the products advertised fit with their audience. In some cases, this works when smaller sites direct traffic to larger sites through an advertisement, in return for a commission if the consumer purchases from the larger business. Large companies like Amazon often offer this type of affiliate deal.

Traditional advertising and marketing initiatives, such as display and classified advertisements, are prevalent on the Internet in the form of banner, pop-up and pop-under advertisements. These are popular with many businesses, and have been shown to drive more traffic to a website than traditional advertising formats.

Evaluating various types of advertising media

In order to determine the success of a campaign and the effectiveness of your chosen type of media, there must be some way of measuring the results. Some forms of advertising may be very successful at attracting attention, but not all enquiries will necessarily convert into sales. This is simple to do when you are looking for a direct response, usually by telephone, from the customer. Other forms of advertising are more difficult to evaluate and it's hard to know if an increase in sales is due to good advertising, or some external factor such as a decline in competition. An advertisement may have reached the right audience, but with the wrong message.

Such issues can only be explored properly through the use of in-depth advertising research methods such as surveys and recall tests, and even then the answers can be ambiguous. Otherwise the well-established small business must rely on their own understanding of what type of people their customers are, and how they make their purchasing decisions.

Hints and tips

• If someone responds to your advertising or publicity by telephone, ensure that you record their name and address.
• If possible, pre-test any advertising before its launch.
• Be aware of new or innovative advertising opportunities, especially at local level, as these could provide a forum for your business promotion.

How to Start Your First Advertising Campaign

Here are the first steps a small business can take toward upping the promotion of its products and services.

When is it time to start an advertising campaign?

A small business will usually consider undertaking an advertising program at a pivotal point in its maturity. This point might be:

• a desire or need to grow
• a sense competitors are growing at a faster pace
• research shows competitors are better known
• a drop in business profits (or donors/donations, for the nonprofits)
• a change in corporate direction or introduction of a new product or service
• a misperception of product service offerings exists among potential customers
• The business should consider a holistic approach that not only encompasses paid advertising, but also includes re-evaluation of the corporate positioning and image, public relations, collateral materials, participation in special events, and so on. There are many, many ways to reach your target audiences beyond paid advertising, and the most successful campaigns include a combination of approaches. In this way, each message reinforces and extends the effects of the others.

How does the business owner know what media will suit them business best?

First, you have to define the target audience. Whether it's business executives between the ages of 35-55 or teenaged boys ages 15-18, once you've defined the audience, media selection becomes easier. For example, teenagers are best reached through radio and select television programming, or posters in schools or youth centers. If you have a highly specialized product that's only used by certain industries or professionals, trade and professional journals may provide the best outlet for advertising.

Is there a calculator or formula you recommend the business owner use to determine their advertising budget? Does it vary by industry?

It truly does vary by industry, gross sales for the company, target audiences, sales objectives, cost of the product or service you are selling, the geographic area to be covered, and the market. For example, advertising in New York and California is considerably more expensive than in Maine. If you're selling a $500,000 computer management system to the top 50 companies in the pharmaceutical industry, you may want to create 50 unique direct mail packages costing $500 apiece and have them hand delivered to 50 CEOs. If you are selling office cleaning services to businesses with 12,000 sq. feet of office space, a classified ad running 40 weeks a year might do the trick.

What is the definition of good advertising?

Good advertising is more relevant to the audience than the advertiser! It solves a problem. It meets a need. It is eye-stopping. It's simple. It gets across one clear idea. It motivates the reader or viewer to take action.

How does a business owner evaluate whether an agency or a freelancer is her best resource?

If you have a reasonable budget ($25,000-50,000 and up), consider using a full-service agency. Not only will they have the copywriting and graphic design talent on staff, they'll have a full-time media planner/buyer on staff as well. An experienced media buyer will know your market and be able to offer the best media recommendations including broadcast and print. They also have the best negotiating power in the marketplace and can often save you money in ad placement, along with ensuring you get the best reach and frequency with your target audience.

If you have a limited budget and you're willing to handle ad placement yourself, freelancers might be a good route. Use a freelance designer and a writer, even though you may be tempted to write the copy yourself. There is a true art to writing ad copy and when every word counts, it pays to have professional help!