Reasons Why Your Advertising May Not Be Working and, What You Can Do About it
December 15th, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized — Advertising Author
The average person is not scanning a newspaper, or listening intently to the radio, or watching television… waiting in search of your advertisement. Even in a local newspaper there may be hundreds of other ads and articles all competing for attention.
To further complicate matters, the reader may be distracted by things happening around them. Noisy kids, the sounds from a television, stereo or radio, an over-heard conversation… these can all compete for the readers attention.
Even if they do spot your ad and decide to buy, other distractions may cause them to forget all about your offer. The timing of your offer may not suit some people. They may be temporarily short of cash, or they might be distracted by major events in their lives, or they may not yet be convinced. There could be any number of reasons why a prospect fails to act.
There is one thing for certain. In some way you need to keep in touch with them repeatedly before they will finally be motivated to act.
Advertising Is Quickly Forgotten If Not Repeated
In his book Guerrilla Marketing Attack, marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson, talks of a year long study on the subject. Research was undertaken to determine how many times a prospect must be exposed to a marketing message to take them from a state of total apathy to purchase readiness.
Fasten your seatbelts because the results may come as a shock.
The researchers concluded that “a marketing message needs to penetrate the mind of a prospect nine times before they buy.”
That was the best news. It also found, “for every 3 times the prospect gets your marketing message – it is missed (or ignored) two of those times.”
Based on that finding, you have got to get your message across a total of 27 times in order to make those nine impressions. You could therefore market your product 26 times with possibly NO results. If you were running one ad a week it could take more than six months to get a response.
It highlights some questions:
- What if you stop running the advertisements too early?
- What if, because of poor results, you decide to change the message or the advertising design?
- What if, for that same reason, you decide to change your advertising medium midstream?
- What if you run out of budget?
- What if you decide half way through a campaign that the strategy or target audience is wrong?
That is why it is really important to start any campaign from a position of strength. You need to know who your target audience is, and how you can best reach them. Have a strategy in place. Even better if you are able to pre-test your advertising message in some way – this will reduce your risk.
Without this advance planning you may be tempted to stop or change your ads just as they are beginning to work. Your prospects may just be starting to feel a sense of familiarity with what you have to say. They may be thinking that they have seen your ads running for a year or so, when it may have been only a few months. They may start feeling comfortable with you and beginning to understand why it would make sense to do business with you. They may be getting warmer and warmer about buying and then… YOU STOP THE ADVERTISING!
Use the Power of Repetition and Give Your Advertising Time to Work
After a reasonable period of time, you can then analysis the results with the view to improving them. If the results were not up to expectation then why weren’t they?
Perhaps the target audience was wrong and you used the wrong newspapers or radio stations. Maybe the message was wrong, or the timing was wrong, or a competitor put a spanner in the works.
Whatever the reason, the important thing is to have a strategy in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
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