5 Basic Advertising Tips

1. Be consistent.

In all of your ad messages and styles including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, signs and banners, use a consistent branding image. This means using the same fonts, colors, taglines, or mottos. This means either using dots, parenthesis, or hyphens in between phone numbers, but not mixing them.

2. Use the vendor as a resource.

Newspapers, radio and TV stations, yellow pages, and full-service web design firms are all helpful in producing the advertising that you will be running with them, but be sure that they are listening to you. Often times your vision can get skewed through the lens of the other companies eye. Make sure what they produce matches your brand and identity.

3. Appreciate referrals, but don’t depend on them.

While traditional word-of-mouth referral advertising has been around a long time, it can fall short of being able to attract the number of customers needed to be successful in business. This is why it is imperative that you business have some other sort of supplementary advertisement, but remember – you are your own best promotional tool. If you don’t believe it, no one else will either.

4. Promote benefits rather than features.

A benefit can be defined as, “The emotional satisfaction your product or service provides, or a tangible performance characteristic.” Have you ever heard the expression, “Sell the hole, not the drill?” Make sure you are promoting the end-result, not what will get them there. In this way you are almost selling them their own success.

5. Know your competitors.

Sun Tzu, author of On the Art of War, wrote the now famous line, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Your competitors may not exactly be your enemies, but knowing everything about them is just as important as knowing everything about your own business. One popular tool for this is Keyword Spy, which allows you to see what key words your competitors are using on their website.