Six Common Advertising Mistakes

Marketing your products and services effectively is seldom as cut and dry as putting your company name and phone number on a flyer and hoping for the best. No, to see real results, you have to have an understanding of the audience you hope to reach, you have to have a clear message you want to get across to your audience and you have to have an attractive ad design.

Its easy to make a mistake in the process that can limit the effectiveness of the ad campaign. With that in mind, consider these avoidable, but far too common mistakes.

1. Choosing the Wrong Medium for Your Needs - Simply choosing the right tool for the job can save you money and ensure that you reach your advertising goal. To use an extreme example, if your intent is simply to get your company name into the minds of local construction companies, why would you spend thousands of dollars on putting your name on a blimp and flying it over the city for a few days? Instead, you could achieve greater success with simple, business card printing and a direct, in person marketing pitch.

2. Not Having an Effective, Attention Grabbing Headline - The first thing your potential customer is going to see is your headline and this one sentence or catch phrase will determine if they bother to read the rest of your ad.. Regardless of the medium your ad takes, you should test your headline. You’ve probably labored over just what to say in your headline, so you may not have the sort of unbiased point of view you need in judging your headline. You should test your headline on several people who aren’t involved in the ad creation process to help measure its impact. This helps you refine your message and ensures that your marketing message appeals to a broad range of prospective buyers.

3. Choosing the Wrong Time to Advertise - . You may have the best product in the world, a once in a lifetime deal or even an award worthy ad design, but if your timing is off, your results will be just as off. It won’t matter how much time and money you put into advertising if the ad campaign reaches consumers at a time when they had simply have no interest in buying the product you‘re looking to sell. For example, if you’re giving away free ice cream with each purchase during a record December cold streak, don’t expect an increase in sales. Save that kind of promotion for a blistering week in July.

4. Relying on a Single Ad - Consumers are hit with hundreds of advertisements everyday. In addition to this, they typically need to see your marketing message an average of 3 times before they notice it. In short, this means achieving results takes time and consistency. Placing a single ad in the newspaper or sending a single postcard cannot deliver effective results. Instead, run your ads for multiple weeks, changing out your ad design at pre-planned intervals to keep your ads fresh and enticing.

5. Failure to Re-engage - Far too often, consumers only hear from companies when its time to buy again. If you have an established customer base already, chances are you’ve worked hard to acquire them. You should be spending some of your marketing budget on retaining the customers you‘ve worked so hard for. Try sending your customers “thank you” post cards to let them know that they are more than just a number to you.

6. Not Measuring Advertising Effectiveness - Over time, your business is going to do a lot of advertising. Regardless of the size of your ad campaign or the expense involved, you need to track your results. This can be done with a simple spreadsheet or, on the other extreme, by hiring an professional statistical analyst. Whatever the case, you need to take note of what works and what doesn’t so that you can improve your results in the future.

If you’re planning on starting up a new ad campaign or just looking to improve your current marketing results, be sure to learn from the mistakes of others. Success means ongoing work towards improving your marketing effectiveness. Avoiding these common marketing mistakes will put you well on your way to delivering noticeable results.

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