Category: Advertising
Advertising is defined as a non-personal form of communication deployed through various media by industries, non profit organizations, business firms, individuals etc. Advertising persuades, informs, instructs and educates target audiences about a particular brand or service and influence the purchasing behaviour or thought pattern of the audience. Advertising is one of the most important tools of marketing and can be coupled with other marketing tools such as sales promotion, personal selling tactics, publicity etc.
Advertising as a tool of marketing is quite different from personal selling. In personal selling, the customer is guided by a sales person, but publicising the advertisement is shown to the customer and the decision is in the hands of the customer. Therefore, advertising may be called written personal selling. Advertising is effective for every single brand, service or business to gain its position in the market.
Advertising creates an impact on every walk of life irrespective of age, gender, caste, creed or religion. Advertising is carried out in various proven tools and mediums and with defined techniques. In this article let us discuss about the four main objectives of an advertising campaign.
Objectives of advertising
The objective(s) of advertising imply the communication tasks to be accomplished. These tasks are directed towards specific customers that a company or organization is trying to reach during a defined time frame. An organization which involves in advertising activities usually strives to achieve at least one of the four common objectives of advertising i.e. trial, continuity, brand switching and switchback.
The purpose of trial objective of advertising is to encourage customers to make an initial purchase of a new product which has been launched in the market. Companies typically deploy creative ad strategies during product launch so that they can stay ahead in the competition. Repeat purchase of the product follows suit so trial objective of the ad campaign should be given more emphasis so as to invite targeted customers.
The next objective of advertising is continuity. Continuity is a typical strategy to keep current customers to stick to the same product. To keep the customers engaged the company usually provides new and different information about the product which is designed to build brand loyalty.
Thirdly, brand switching is one of the widely employed objective of advertising. This technique is adopted when companies want customers to switch to their brand from their competitor’s brand. Brand switching strategy needs a convincing communication so that the mindset of the customer is changed.
Last but not the least brand switchback objective is another strategy used by advertisers or brand owners to win back their former customers. For this a particular company may highlight new features about the product, discount of price, provide useful information about the product- all these to attract back their former customers.
Advertising is a tricky art for brand communication. As an advertiser one should have exceptional advertising skill(s) to influence the right target group and to provide a lasting impression about the brand so that customers stick to the same brand in the future.
Reference Website: – www.tdiindia.com
Whether you’re crowdsourcing promotional activity,content or ideas, here’s a quick set of generally applicable guidelines for getting started – sourced for this article in early 2009 from businesses that crowdsource (see below for acknowledgements).
1 Start Small: Recruit internal champions and nurture small crowdsourcing experiments first. Crowdsourcing veteran and Intuit co-founder Scott Cook suggests seeking organisational buy-in only after you’ve had some success. Otherwise, the countercultural jump of
crowdsourcing may be too big for many brands
2 Remember the 90:9:1 Rule: Temper participation level expectations; only up to 1% of any online community ever contributes actively to anything. 9% may deign to vote, rate or comment, whilst the overwhelming 90% only ever consume content.
3 Get the Motivational Mix Right: Participation in crowdsourcing is motivated by a number of factors but they boil down to the 4Fs – Fame, Fortune, Fun and Fulfilment. Good crowdsourcing initiatives should offer participants a mix of all four Fs.
4 Deal with Sturgeon’s Law: A complex law to understand, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s maxim is that ‘90% of everything is crap’ – and it applies to crowdsourcing contributions. So you’ll need a system in place, like user voting, to filter out the rubbish.
5 Harness Joy’s Law: The counterpoint to Sturgeon’s Law, ‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,’ attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. The key to smart crowdsourcing is to identify and coalesce expert talent pools that lie outside your company.
6 KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid: Crowdsourcing only works when the task is simple for contributors. Lengthy forms, obtuse IT and arduous tasks are crowd dispersers. 1-click participation should be your goal.
7 Community Rules: Community is the social glue of crowdsourcing, so allow contributors to connect with each other, as well as with the sponsoring brand. Where possible, build on existing communities rather than build new communities, and keep the focus on communities
of practice (based on what people do rather than what they think (designers, creatives, coaches etc))
8 Manage the Process: Crowdsourcing initiatives need to be actively managed. Starbucks has a team of 48 specially trained employees who act as discussion hosts, encouraging participation and feeding back on ideas. Jeff Bruzzo who heads up Starbuck’s crowdsourcing initiative says: ‘These are the people at a dinner party who make sure everyone is having a
good time.’
9 Get Legal Involved: Crowdsourcing often involves the transfer of some kind of an intellectual property,which is not a problem in itself, but you’ll need a cast iron ‘terms and conditions’ clause for contributors
10 Promote the Platform: Whether you’re using a crowdsourcing community or contest, you’ll need to enthusiastically attract contributors. Promote your initiative with online banner advertising, Google ads, and email campaigns, and even traditional media advertising and PR
Link-http://www.fleaser.com
The increasing popularity of the pay per click advertising model has led to a new challenge: click fraud. Click fraud is basically a way to make money by causing others to lose money. Click fraud, in essence, is any kind of fraud involving repeatedly clicking on advertising with a malicious intention. There are different types of click fraud, but this problem has driven up advertising costs and generally cost merchants hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they should be paying in click costs.
One example of click fraud is a way to cheat the competition. In this scheme, a company or individual will pay groups of people, usually foreigners, to click on certain ads all day for a set amount of money. This drives up advertising costs for the company whose ad is being clicked, thus harming their bottom line. None of the parties who are committing the click fraud intend to buy the products sold on the website whose ad they are clicking.
Another example of click fraud is dummy sites created for the sole purpose of creating phony clicks. By creating a site that posts pay per click advertising from publishers like Googles AdWords, creators of these dummy sites hope to drive up profits by increasing the number of clicks that appear on their sites. One way to do this is to click these links themselves, though most publishers have provisions in place to hopefully eliminate this kind of fraud. Another way would be to pay someone else, preferably someone overseas, to do the clicking.
There is simply not enough information to determine how common or how costly click fraud is because hard numbers are hard to obtain. Plus, determining which clicks are frauds and which are real can be a real problem for the publishers of advertising. Click fraud may constitute up to 20% of the PPC market, which drives up costs for advertisers. The problem is that PPC advertising works too well for some companies to give up on PPC as part of their marketing plan. While Google and Yahoo! both claim on to be vigilant in their search for click fraud, plenty of instances go unnoticed and slip through the cracks.
The potential for PPC fraud shouldnt be a deal breaker for most advertisers. The best way to keep from falling prey to PPC fraud is to be aware of the issue and exercise caution and vigilance. The following guidelines will help prevent PPC fraud from unnecessarily draining an advertising budget.
Use only search engine PPC providers. Search engine providers are particularly effective at identifying fraudulent activity, especially since these sites go to great lengths to monitor for and prevent click fraud.
Vigilance in tracking results can also help identify problems. Watch the numbers closely, especially at the beginning of the campaign, and notify the PPC provider immediately if the ad begins receiving an unusually high number of clicks especially clicks that do not lead to a sale.
Set a daily, weekly, or monthly ad budget with the PPC provider. When the budget is exhausted for that time period, the ad should be removed. This will prevent a websites entire operating budget from being drained by click fraud.
Aside from click fraud, other challenges to PPC advertising strategies include the cost and longevity of a PPC campaign. Some keywords are extremely popular and thus competitive. Competitive keywords tend to cost more per click and can quickly drive up advertising costs. Longevity is another issue. Unlike SEO techniques, which will improve a sites volume of traffic for years, a PPC campaign is only a viable source of traffic as long as the site continues to pay for the campaign. When a website decides to end a PPC campaign, the traffic from the campaign will stop.
Digital Signage is the answer to the on-going Retail question of how best to influence customers during the final stages of their purchase decision.
Reaching consumers in their homes is an increasingly difficult task and advertisers are looking to Digital Signage as a new way to effectively reach potential customers. The power of digital signage comes from the targeting ability, flexibility and cost efficiency. Companies need only compare the cost for a few seconds of television that might reach a small percentage of their customer base far away from the point of purchase, to that of Digital Signage.
Running branded advertising within the retail store itself means you will have a much shorter time line from promotion to purchase. This advertising method has been called Point Of Sale (POS) or Point Of Purchase (POP) . While these are not new methods, using Digital Signage is relatively new and gives the ability to deliver timely content that is dynamic enough to catch the attention of your target market in store.
The ability to update advertising instantly from within the store can help move slow moving stock. Target a particular time and area of your store to promote a particular item or sale. This is the power of POS advertising, made faster and more dynamic by digital signage.
Successful retailers are rethinking advertising thanks to a new in-store approach to messaging. Its called point-of-decision marketing, and you can use it improve the shopping experience of your customers. It can increase how long your customers shop and the size of their purchases. It can even motivate them to decrease the time they take deciding to buy.
Point-of-decision marketing gives you an effective tool to restore declining revenue and improve sales of high-margin transactions. Thus making it capable to Recover your ROI in couple of months leaving you with huge margins.
If digital signage is done well, it is proven to deliver a high return on investment. Advertising is an obvious source of revenue, the effective deployment of digital signage will also have a big influence on consumer buying behavior. Digital signage eliminates the overheads that are associated with traditional print media and studies show that the use of digital displays in retail can increase new product sales by as much as 300%.
One should also be very careful will choosing the digital signage solution and ensure that it one of best and latest solution offered to them. Truknox technologies offer one latest and finest digital signage solution for the retail industry.
Truknox (‘truenox’) Technologies, headquartered in New Delhi, India, is an avant-garde business entity committed to the design, development and support t of quality software. The company developed the Tru-i, which is revolutionary product for digital signage and associated communication systems.
Tru-I is digital signage software designed for the (Windows VISTA) platform. Simultaneously being XP compatible andreadyforWindows7,thus safeguarding your investment for the future. Its highly modular and scalable architecture, combined with an intuitive drag and drop Graphic User Interface, makes Tru-I unmatched in exibility and user-friendliness.
Kansas is a wonderful city offering an extensive range of business opportunities. If you are one of those aspiring entrepreneurs, you have umpteen ways to make sure that your business flourishes. One way to advertise your services are sign boards and if you feel that your signs have become quite outdated, its high time you looked for a competent signage manufacturer who can supply you with excellent products that will make your prospective clients look up and take notice.
Although there are many signage companies in the state, most of them provide you with very poor service and they even get away with it as you are unable to meet them directly. It is always better to go for a good local firm that will offer a wonderful range of signage products to select from. Some companies even offer custom made signs which is indeed excellent as far as advertising is concerned. A first rate sign company in Kansas City even helps you to include your logo on it.
So it is important that you take time to browse and find out the best local signage manufacturer that suits your requirements and offer solutions right within your budget at the same time. Most of these companies will have an excellent customer service team that caters to your requirements and ensures that the products are delivered on time. They even give valuable suggestions regarding design and ensure that you finally choose something that is apt for your business. Remember that creating signage requires experts who have extensive knowledge, precision, experience and the right skills to get quality results.
The main aim of a reputed sign company will be to create and design your sign board in such a way that it not only appears appealing to the eye but also provides good boost to your products leaving an indelible mark on the mind of the viewer. So go ahead and search for the perfect signage company that can cater to your whims and provide you with the best results that will go a long way in successfully advertising your business. Just ensure that you spend enough time choosing them as don’t need to regret later after choosing a firm without doing proper homework. You can look for a company that offers custom solutions right from creating signs to installing them properly in your business premises.