Small Business Advertising Fundamentals | Business, Marketing and ...

Small-business people are surprised to hear that the game-winning fundamentals of advertising were firmly established in a book called Scientific Advertising, which was published in the 1920s. That was an entire generation before radio and television.

The types of media you can advertise in may change over time, but the fundamentals never change. Whether you advertise your small-business by mail, with fliers, on the Internet, or even by radio or TV, you will produce more sales for your business when you focus on excellent execution of the fundamentals.

1. The Power of One Message.
Advertising that gets high response rates conveys a single message. Master salesmen ask questions to learn the dominant buying emotion of their prospects. When they have received sufficient information from their prospect, they focus their selling effort entirely around that dominant emotion to the exclusion of everything else.

Advertising is salesmanship in print and images, and the fundamentals are the same. Know your customer. Keep your advertising laser focused on your product?s one benefit that satisfies your customer?s dominant buying emotion and desire.

2. The Need for Proof
Every single claim that you make in you advertising message must be backed up with proof or the person reading your ad will immediately dismiss it as just more BS. Proof can be simple but it must be specific and factual. Ivory soap achieved market dominance with its credible proof that Ivory soap was 99-44/100% pure. McDonald?s in its early days established its credibility by announcing the millions and then billions of hamburgers people had already bought from them.

3. Ask Your Reader to Do Something Now
Corporations with hundred million dollar advertising budgets can afford to get boondoggled by the mythical benefits of brand advertising. The small-business cannot. Every advertisement you do regardless of the medium must ask the reader to call you, e-mail you, signup for a mailing list, or just plain buy something from you. Advertisements that tell people how great you are are a waste of money.

4. Make Doing What You Want Easy
When you ask your reader to do something make sure that what you are asking is very easy to accomplish. Gary Halbert, a master salesman in print, always went into great detail about what phone number to call, who would answer the telephone, and what they would say when they answered. Specificity builds trust.

5. Test and Measure Everything
Sometimes changing a word, a sentence, an image, or a color can change the response rate of an advertisement by hundreds of a percent. No individual can substitute their own judgment for their readers. The only way to know what works is to test and measure.

Source: http://cfpnyc.com/small-business-advertising-fundamentals.html

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