Plan and test your print advertising

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With careful planning your print advertising can give you a healthy return on your investment. Get it wrong, though, and it could be the biggest drain on your marketing budget.

• Advertising doesn’t have to be expensive. You can use classified ads and small display ads very effectively as enquiry generators. Always offer something of value to the reader. Add their details to your prospect database. Data Protection note: If you’re selling to the public, you must give them the option of having their details removed. Ask them to tick a box and return the letter or form to you if they do not want you to contact them again. Not many will do so.
• Start small and grow your print advertising with your success. Test your ads in different media, with different offers. Sooner or later you will find a formula that works better than the others (see Testing for more on this). Once you’ve found the right audience with the right offer, you can start to increase. Bigger ads normally pull more response. Don’t waste $500 to find out this magazine doesn’t work for you, when $100 might have told you that.

• Stick to the formula. Headline, benefits, proof, no risk, action. As you grow, the formula stays the same. Even when you graduate to full-page ads, there’s no difference. You may need more graphical elements to pull them in, but there’s no substitute for a good headline.
• The headline is king. Concentrate most of your effort on the headline. This will make or break your print advertising. Your average reader dwells for between 1 and 5 seconds before moving on. If you don’t catch their attention, you’ve lost them. Think about how you read a newspaper or magazine yourself. You look for the features you know and love, skimming over the rest. What makes you stop and take a second look?

A Low-cost Action Plan for Your Print Advertising

1. Choose a subject for a small classified ad to pull enquiries. What can you give away as an incentive for the reader to respond? If nothing else, just use your standard sales material.

2. Identify the publications where you could test your ad. Make a list. As before, get a copy of each and see the style of advertising in the section you’d be targeting. Again, contact non-competitive advertisers who may be targeting a similar audience. Ask them how well it works for them.

3. When you’ve done your research, run an ad. It shouldn’t cost a fortune. Even in the national press you can run a small classified ad for under $100. Look at it as an investment, not a cost. Remember the ‘cost per enquiry’ calculation we did earlier. Bear this in mind when analysing your response. How many enquiries turn into real prospects, and then sales?

4. Run your new directory ad (see previous page) as a test in the local paper or a trade publication, whichever is appropriate for you. The response should indicate whether you’ve got it right. You can save yourself the expense of running a duff ad for a full year in the directory by choosing one you know works elsewhere.

5. As you progress to larger ads, you may need to engage a designer or advertising agency to lay them out professionally for you. It depends on your own skills in this area, and whether you have the tools. Personally, I do my own, but the choice is yours.

6. Large display ads can cost thousands of pounds. See the next page for great ways to test a full-page ad for next to nothing.