How to Choose the Right Advertising Medium for Your Business, Product or Service?

This is one of the most important questions, in order to achieve positive high results from your advertising campaign. You just have to remember - the cheapest may not always be best.

Advertising is by far the most difficult and most costly part of any business operation. So before I discuss how to choose the right media for you, I have to tell you my iron clad rule for any advertising effort.

Advertising can never be an expense; it must always be an investment. There must be at least a 75% expectation that the advertising will reach and produce more in sales than it will cost to place. If you don't have that 75% expectation then you should not place the advertising.

Our company provides services in ads placement for multiple companies in a different professional fields

• Gas Station
  Benefits of Gas Station Media
  • Captures consumer attention for 3-5 minutes.
  • Frequency: On average, consumers visit gas stations five times a month.
  • Very inexpensive CPM. (Cost Per Thousand)
  • Display for a captive audience: No channels to change...No pages to turn!
  • Visibility: Ads are well-lit, well-maintained, and often located in residential neighborhoods where traditional billboards don't exist.
  • Target your exact market by demographics and shopping habits.
• Restaurants / Bars / Nightclubs
• Health Clubs
• Beauty Salons
• Arenas/Stadiums
• Casinos
• Apartments
• Bridal Salons
• Movie Theaters
• Golf Courses
• Car Wash
• Amusement
• Malls
  • The ability to target by gender, demographic profile, geographic location and ethnic group
  • Coverage is available where billboards and other media cannot reach.
  • Higher recall rate
  • Positive ad reaction
• Other
  • Billboards
  • Street Furniture
  • Smart Buses
• Local Media

USEFUL TIPS:

Information provided with permit of Tom Egelhoff www.smalltownmarketing.com

What forms of advertising are available?
There are many differences between advertising options in small towns as opposed to large cities. Your small town may not have a newspaper, TV station or even radio. So your options to choose the media of advertising that will reach your target market may be limited in many respects because it has to come from outside sources. In spite of these restrictions here are some amazing facts. In America today there are:

• Six major television networks
• Over 12,000 magazines
• 15,000 newsletters
• 2,000 newspapers
• 6,000 radio stations
• Over 7,000 cable systems
• Your fax machine receives 10 ads a week
• 5,000 prime web sites (Fortune 500 & others) and millions more being added each day.
• If you aren't already, you will be receiving about 100-120 advertising emails each week.
• Your dinner will be interrupted at least twice a week by a telemarketer.
• And, the average American will receive about 3 pieces of "junk mail" every day of the year.

With all of the above sources the average person receives about 3-5,000 advertising messages per day. That translates into about $3,500 for every man, woman and child.

As you can see, even though the various Medias may not be available to you locally your customers are still receiving these messages from all sorts of competing products and services. All you have to do is make yours stand out from all the rest.

What to know before you buy?
In order to determine the right media to purchase there are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

• What is your true message? - What exactly do you want customers to know and how is your advertising going to make them react? Is your advertising designed to promote your business name or is it designed to bring customers to your place of business? Remember point two in the first section above. Is your message emotional or logical? Are you selling a car with four doors? (A logical feature) Or are you selling the convenience of getting the kids and dogs in and out of the car easier? (An emotional benefit.)
• Who and where is your target market? - If you are selling farm equipment are your customers in town or on the farm? Right. On the farm. So why waste advertising dollars that reach towns people who are not your target market even though that media may also reach your target market? See the next point for more on this.
• Cost per thousand? - Remember point one from above? Advertising must always be an investment never an expense. Media sales people are going to talk to you in terms of cost per thousand. This is the per person cost it takes to reach their audience. Notice I said "their audience" not your target market. So how does my farm analogy from above fit in here? What you should be concerned with is cost per customer. How much does advertising cost to bring a target market customer into your place of business? Cost per thousand is immaterial if most of the audience is not your target market. The cost per customer would probably make this advertising too costly for a satisfactory return on your advertising investment.

Are you beginning to see why it's easy to waste money by advertising in the wrong place? It's easy to place a newspaper ad, TV commercial or radio ad and hope it reaches the right people. In most cases if you haven't done your homework it won't.