Category Archives: Advertising

Local Newspaper Advertising for Small Business 3

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The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Okay so we’ve had the ugly in local newspaper advertising for small business and we’ve had the bad in local newspaper advertising for small business so perhaps now it’s time for the not-so-bad in local newspaper advertising.

an example of reasonable local newspaper advertising for small business

As you can see it certainly has a headline that grabs your attention and, if you’re a pain suffer (like I am), it engages you but it fails in one important area and certainly leaves me with a slightly negative impression. It offers no hope for relief from that pain and if there’s no hope then there’s no reason for me to call.

Do you agree?

By the way, I should explain about the lines that are blurred. This lady operates from her home … and happens to be our next-door neighbour – and I wasn’t comfortable about revealing her home address to all and sundry on the Internet.

Local Newspaper Advertising for Small Business 2

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The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Yesterday I started this little series about advertising in the local newspaper by showing you an ad that fell right into the downright ugly category. It wasn’t ugly from a visual point of view but it left out one vital detail – the name of the business – and you can see it here.

Today’s example of small business advertising falls into the ‘bad’ category. Once again, you might think that it doesn’t look all that bad (and it doesn’t once it was scanned and enhanced on the computer) but as it appeared in the paper important parts of this ad were unreadable.

poor colours in a newspaper ad

You see, the colours in the text blended into the background colours to the point where most people would have had trouble reading the text.

Local Newspaper Advertising for Small Business

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The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Back in March I talked briefly about advertising in the local newspaper and you can find those two posts here and an update here.

Since then I’ve been looking around at some of the small business advertising that’s been appearing in the local newspapers and I thought that it might be helpful to show you some examples over the next few days of good, bad and perhaps downright terrible advertising that’s been appearing over the last few weeks.

I think it’s important to bring you something like this because so many small businesses rely on the local newspaper for the major part of the advertising … and sadly those small businesses may not be getting the service they need and deserve.

So perhaps, after looking at some of the advertising I have to show you, you may feel confident enough to take control of your own advertising instead of relying on untrained or inexperienced sales staff at the local newspapers where you operate your small business.

So let’s start some really bad advertising – in fact you really can’t get more ugly than this:

really bad small business advertising

And why is it so ugly? It certainly catches the eye and, in a way, it does tell a story that a lot of people might see as being applicable to them … if only they knew what shop was offering the deal.

It’s not even in the fine print and even the address is not enough to identify the business because there are around 15 shops at that address. Sure there is a phone number there but who’s going to call a phone number when you don’t really know if the business on the other end is really relevant to them.

Whoever wrote that ad … and whoever passed the ad for publication have allowed a business to spend a lot of money on an ad that will do absolutely nothing.

Word of Mouth Advertising for Small Business

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by Stuart Livesey

We all know – or we should all know – that word-of-mouth advertising is the best your small business can get. When a satisfied customer tells their friends about the great experience they had when they did business with your small business their friends are encouraged to do business with you too.

But there’s another form of word-of-mouth advertising that you may not have thought of. It’s the word-of-mouth advertising that you can do about your business.

Yesterday the rechargeable battery in our camera died in the middle of shooting a whole bunch of images for an online gift store that Toni is setting up so we headed down the the local battery shop to buy a replacement. While we were there we got into conversation with the guy behind the counter and mentioned that we used the camera extensively in our business and after six years of use we felt we had been well-served by the old battery.

He asked us what line of business we were in – we mentioned web design – we mentioned two local businesses that we had done work for and now we’re quoting on a website for a golf buggy business that he and his partner run in conjunction with the battery shop.

Word-of-mouth marketing – it’s that easy.

Advertising – It’s All About Telling a Story

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by Stuart Livesey

The experts will tell you that good advertising is all about telling a story. Obviously it’s a story that you have to tell in as few a words as possible.

The really short advertising stories are the ones you see on billboards. Some are a waste of space because they’re simply not focused enough or use way too many words and images to tell the story.

Others absolutely nail the message in just a couple of words.

Hard hitting billboard ad

Toni and I were in Brisbane yesterday and we say this billboard in several different spots around the city. It catches your eye, it tells a story and it offers hope to a market place that’s far bigger than you might think.

What more could you ask for?

Small Business Can Beat the Bigger End of Town at Their Own Game

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by Stuart Livesey

The big end of town can overwhelm the marketplace with advertising. They have more money to spend and they can call on the resources of huge advertising firms but who says that they spend their money wisely and who says that the big firms have a clue about what can resonate with consumers in the local area?

Here is a quote from John Carlton, a well-known American copywriter, that should give you some encouragement not to let the big guys win simply because they are big.

For business owners, the lack of good writing in your market is an opening you should leap into with guns blazing. Whether it’s honing your sales message, or building up your content and nurturing your list… this is the most important writing you will ever do.

And doing it really, really well allows you to stand out no matter how much better funded, or better situated your competition is. A single good copywriter can go up against Attila The Hun, Inc, and win.

You can read more of what he said here and you can find the rest of his blog here

Producing an Effective Newspaper Ad for Small Business – Update

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It’s now been a week since the newspaper ad that I referred to here was published.

The results, that I talked about in the case study that you will find here, continue.

More new customers are coming in every day to have their computers repaired and something else has happened that I really didn’t expect after reflecting on the ad. Rick’s picked up an order from a new customer for a new high-end machine who saw the ad and liked the plain, simple language.

Producing an Effective Newspaper Ad for Small Business

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by Stuart and Toni Livesey

Perhaps this could have been titled this “How we turned a $5.00 mouse into more work than the client could handle” … because we did.

We could also say that the moral of this story is ‘don’t ask because you may just get what you ask for’ but we’ll try and be serious and say that A Case Study in Newspaper Advertising for Small Business is an interesting look at how we made some local newspaper advertising work for one small business.

We think there are some lessons there for you too.

Advertising Your Small Business

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Print isn’t dead – you may just need to look beyond the obvious choices

Here in the town where I live more and more small businesses are finding that advertising in the local papers is becoming uneconomic. That’s not surprising because circulation of the daily paper is dropping as the quality of their reporting drops and few people bother to read the free papers.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that advertising at the local level is becoming uneconomic because advertising in newspapers at the state and national level is going the same way.

But some businesses are finding that there is one type of newspaper where the return on investment for every advertising dollar spent is still worthwhile. Those newspapers are the college papers in the United States (university to most other people) and they are effective because:

    1. The readership is local

    2. Students do have money to spend

    3. Research has shown that 76% of US college students read their campus papers.

So if your small business is located near a university/college and you have a product that students would buy think about the campus paper the next time you want to advertise.

You can read more about campus papers here

Click Fraud Puts Adsense Under Threat

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Ok, I’m back and my absence can’t be blamed on the holidays – the 4th July is just another day of the year here in Australia. I would have been back yesterday but something I ate on Monday night gave me a lot of very unhappy returns so yesterday was all down to recovery :)

So what to talk about today – well something that Toni and I have been suggesting for quite some time and that is that the pay-per-click model of advertising is not going to last.

For those of you who don’t know what pay-per-click advertising is let me point you to the bar of advertising that appears on the right hand side of every page you get when you do a search on Google. With Google it’s called Adwords or Adsense depending on whether you’re an advertiser or a publisher (website owner).

The reason that pay-per-click will go is click fraud and that happens when advertisers have to pay for clicks that hit their ads that come from publishers rather than genuine surfers who are interested in buying the product that the advertiser is selling.

Click fraud is costing advertisers a huge amount of money and Google and the others who offer pay-per-click advertising are unable to prevent it. Just how big a problem it’s becoming can be seen in the article at the other end of this link.

So if your small business makes money from pay-per-click advertising on your website then it really is time to start looking at other revenue streams because pay-per-click is going to dry up.