If you are looking to advertise your service or product in REM and you expect a fast response or immediate sales from one ad – then please don’t advertise here. In fact, don’t advertise anywhere. Save your money. If you insist on spending money, spend it somewhere else.
Please listen to me.
Advertising is a great tool for selling. It is the most effective tool for selling available to you. But like all tools, if you don’t use it right, it may not be very useful.
Advertising is a part of marketing. Marketing is a campaign to create awareness. To create awareness of your service you must do your best research, do some creative thinking, consider where the best places to advertise are and follow through. One of the most important things to remember is that you never know what will really work for certain and what will bomb. Be ready and flexible for the unexpected.
At the end of the day, no one is a true expert. So take heart that you are pretty much starting on an even footing with everybody else. With that in mind, here is one fundamental rule that will never change.
Advertising always makes an impression. If advertising is done frequently, the impression becomes more and more familiar to the reader. If advertising is done infrequently, the impression it makes is not that great and it is forgotten sooner.
It is pretty much that simple.
For most services and products, people need time to absorb the impression, become familiar with the impression and then make the purchase. People will purchase things that they are familiar with and those are things that have given them a good, lasting impression. That impression comes with advertising frequency.
The bottom line is if you are going to advertise just once, don’t. It probably won’t work. You won’t get a call or any response.
Are there exceptions? You bet there are. Announcement ads and recruitment ads are appropriate to run once. Plus, every now and then an ad comes along that brings fantastic one-time results. It happens. But please believe me, those times are rare. More than 99 per cent of the time, ‘one time ads’ don’t work.
Among the worst calls we get here at REM for advertising are; “I would like to run some advertising. I will try it out once and if it works I will advertise more.”
I do everything I can to dissuade this person from advertising. First of all, no one knows what is going to work in advertising. Secondly and most importantly, running an ad once means that you have a more than 99 per cent chance that the ad will not work. Why gamble such long odds when you know it is probably not going to work?
Here is a humble suggestion on advertising.
Let’s say you have a service you would like to promote and expand. Let’s say that service is real estate. This service might seem the same as a lot of other people who offer real estate services. How do you advertise?
Think of a good pleasing message that is consistent. I have seen lots of catch phrases like the
“Waterfront King” or “Call Shirley and start packing, your house is going to be sold quickly”.
Some messages border on crass, like “Jerry the real estate Jaguar”. Believe it or not, these kinds of slogans work if they are done frequently. I think they would work better if they were more to the point and a little less crass like, “Call Jim the real estate expert” or “Call Rita for real estate services.” But the point is, frequency works even more than the message, sadly.
Nothing beats a good reputation in the industry. Absolutely nothing. But if you are rolling out a new service or if you are looking to enhance a business that is already reputable in another area or to a new level, you should advertise.
Advertise with consistency and advertise frequently. Advertising is an investment. It is a campaign. Advertising is not something you do if you have a bit of extra money to advertise once. Please believe me. Take your family or friends out to attend a good show and a nice dinner instead of advertising once. You will get more out of it.
Heino Molls is publisher of REM. Email [email protected].
