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Anatomy of an Inspired Action
Team-building is an inside-job
Author: Carolyn Wilson-Elliott
In a staff meeting, Martha described all the obstacles and setbacks her team had encountered while starting a new project. She was frustrated and tired. Her energy was low. Soon,...
Boost Profits: Market to the Gay Community
Research shows that the gay and lesbian market is worth cultivating, no matter what your product or service. Despite the cultural changes during the past fifty years the gay and lesbian market is still relatively untapped. According to GLINN...
Could This Be The Best Way To Measure Public Relations Results?
Could This Be The Best Way To Measure Public Relations Results? by Robert A. Kelly Could be. In fact, I believe it is. How can you measure the results of an activity more accurately than when you clearly achieve the goal you set at the beginning...
Innovation Management – forced into it!
Whilst there is a lot of lip service given to innovation, the reality is that it often results from competitors making significant gains – competitors who themselves have had to be innovative to challenge existing market leaders. Good examples are...
Know the Building Blocks of Dialogue that Lead to New Learning, Innovation and Synergy
With the complexity and continuous change leaders and managers face today, continuous learning, responsiveness, adaptation and innovation are essential survival skills. Yet, one constant that human beings seem to want and need more than anything...
Meditation: Why Just Sitting There Isn't Just Sitting There
Meditation: Why Just Sitting There Isn’t Just Sitting There At first you might not think this is a tool for creativity. Meditation does typically involve sitting quietly by yourself for a period of time. No computers or pens or pads of paper...
Secret F/r/ee Ingredient Transforms Web Sites Into Money Machines
The key to transforming your website into a serious income generator that consistently converts visitors into cash customers is right in front of your nose. Without beating around the bush, the often overlooked secret ingredient is, quite...
Seven Ways To Put Show Biz Into Your Tradeshow
Seven Ways To Put Show Biz Into Your Tradeshow
By Susan Friedmann, CSP
The best way to attract and mobilize more customers to attend your trade show is to bring a "show biz" mentality to all your marketing and at-show strategies. After all, you...
Tame the Interruption Beast
Interruptions. Arghhh. One of the biggest problems for us home-based business types is the relentless stream of things that disrupt our train of thought. Unexpected phone calls, children that need attention, the dog needs to go out, the cat needs to...
The Truth about Making Money Online
You have probably seen hundreds of websites offering you ways to
make a living from the internet. As you probably know by now,
most of them don't work. Nevertheless, among all that trash must
be a couple of jewels, or they wouldn't be promoted at...
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Advertising On A Budget - Part 2: Thinking Small
This is the second article of a three-part series. I'm illustrating the marketing challenges of a small business, PrescottWeddings.com.
Our goal was to both build the PWC brand and drive traffic to the Web site. Advertising regularly was essential. Yet it was also essential to keep our costs down. So we leveraged our monthly newspaper advertising to stretch our marketing dollar as far as we could.
How did we do that? We "thought small."
We bought one inch by two column inch ads (a column inch in this particular publication is approximately 1.88 inches). The ads were one inch high and almost 4 inches long.
To reflect the small ad, the copy also had to be short and sweet. Like so:
www.PrescottWeddings.com. Everything you need to say "I do."
Just the name of the business and the slogan.
We put the name in large type and made the tagline much smaller.
Did it work?
The first day this ad ran, we garnered 350 hits on the Web site and several phone calls from business owners who wanted more information.
And that was just the beginning. Hits steadily grew during the campaign, and every time it ran we always noticed a jump.
Not bad for a little ad.
Conventional wisdom says bigger is better. And while it is true that big ads stand out (after all, they do take a big chunk of real estate on the page) it doesn't mean big is the only way to go. Small ads can pack a punch too.
Why did the PWC ad work? First of all, it got noticed because it stuck out (yes, small ads can stick out). It had an odd shape -- long and thin, not a square like so many other ads. The name was big -- bigger than many other fonts surrounding it. (But not so big that the ad lacked sufficient white space.)
But probably the biggest reason it worked was because the message was simple.
This is clearly a Web site about having a wedding in the Prescott area. Therefore if you're involved with weddings, whether as a business or on a more personal level, and you're also associated with Prescott, then this is a Web site clearly worth taking a peek at.
People instantly got the message. And they got it even if they only scanned the paper. It was quick and painless for them -- something all ads should strive to be.
What's also interesting is how this ad hit its target market. I've spoken to people (mostly men) who have no interest in getting married and have never seen the ad even though they read the paper. Conversely, businesses in the wedding industry and brides have said they see the ad all the time.
Now, you may have a business name that doesn't capture your business' products or services as well as PrescottWeddings.com (my business name for example). In this case, why not think of a catchy tag line you can use in those small ads to drive people to your Web site?
Web sites can be huge, wordy, information-stuffed selling tools. So use short, sweet one-message statement to get people to go look and learn more about your business rather than try to shove everything in an ad. Don't forget to include your business name and logo for branding purposes.
About the author:
Michele Pariza Wacek owns Creative Concepts and Copywriting, a writing, marketing and creativity agency. She offers two free e-newsletters that help subscribers combine their creativity with hard-hitting marketing and copywriting principles to become more successful at attracting new clients, selling products and services and boosting business. She can be reached at http://www.writingusa.comCopyright 2005 Michele Pariza Wacek.
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