Advertising is an ongoing process, that you will likely have to continually do in order to keep your business a success. If you want your ad spend to be as efficient as possible, you will have to review what you are doing (and why) regularly.
You should also keep the following final few points in mind. These are overarching ideas that will help your advertising efforts be all that they can be:
The Salesperson Is The Key
When dealing with display networks or individual websites (as opposed to faceless ad platforms), personal relationships become very important.
Online advertising works by paying salespeople commission on every sale they make. These salespeople will change company every 14 months on average. This means they generally have very little actual loyalty to their company and are far more interested in their commission.
This is important for you to know, because in reality, when you buy advertising space from someone over the phone, you are in practice really only dealing with the salesperson and not the company as a whole. The salesperson is just selling, what they are selling is unimportant to them – it’s just a job.
The salespeople’s managers and the company’s leadership will impact on what they can and can’t do, and how they sell to you overall. But it is important to remember that the sale itself is conceived as a personal relationship between you and the salesperson.
The salesperson will want you to like them so they can take you and your advertising budget with them when they move company. Equally, it’s worth your time to cultivate a good relationship with them.
If you can convince them that you will be a regular lifelong customer of theirs, they will make efforts to give you better customer service than perhaps your budget would otherwise garner.
They may also call you to give you a good deal whenever they need to make just a little extra money to hit their goals.
Keeping Users Interested
It should be noted that in many cases you can “wear out” the users of one site over time. This means if you keep advertising the same product to the same people, then, in the long run, they will stop caring.
Here are a few of the simplest ways around this:
- Don’t advertise on one site ALL the time – take breaks from even your best-performing sites.
- Have at least a few favourite places to advertise which you can rotate between.
- Keep changing the content of your adverts every few months.
It is amazing how a small amount of variety in your adverts can really re-interest your potential customers. You don’t need to constantly create new ads to get people interested, you just need to change out your ads every 3 months (at least).
You can reuse old ads after you have taken them down after 6 months or so (but you will need a new copy eventually).
Also, it’s a simple fact that ads that have some sort of animation do much better than static ads just because they catch the eye more easily. You don’t need some amazing animation to do this – an animated gif that rotates between static images will often do.
New Isn’t Always Good
If you are offered to be the first company to try out a brand new advertising solution (a new type of ad), our advice is generally: don’t.
This is because new types of advertising, although potentially great at reaching your customers, will always come with their own pitfalls and problems and the network trying to sell them to you won’t have worked them out yet.
New ideas can be good, but getting what you pay for (without it breaking) is always better. It’s fine to be an early adopter – but not probably not the earliest adopter.
Next: Demanding Compensation