How to Increase Profits by Selecting the Best Ad Campaign

An average of 20 percent of a businesses’ yearly revenue goes toward sales and marketing efforts. In tough economic times, it is particularly important for businesses to select an advertising campaign which targets the right customers and provides the most value for the price.

Research the competition. Find out which companies are doing well in sales and reputation, and study their online presence. Study how other leading companies utilize social media, ezine articles and other online content to promote products and services. Free software is available to perform search engine analysis to determine where various companies rank on major search engines.

Don’t waste precious dollars on advertising to the wrong groups. Conduct simple surveys to determine customer demographics. Then make sure your message gets out to the right potential customers. Facebook and Twitter advertisements may be more appropriate than newspaper and other print ads. Certain businesses benefit from concentrated local advertising in a small geographic area.

You can design an advertisement campaign without breaking the bank. Many opportunities exist online for free advertising, including free classified advertising, ezine articles and social media postings. Free classified advertising and content development for posting articles and social media messages takes time.
If your business has an advertising budget, place pay-per click ads, or hire a company to handle the advertising campaign.

Split-testing is a commonly used technique to determine which ads are most effective. Run several ads concurrently in the same media outlets for the same duration of time and compare click-through rates and sales conversions. Constantly assess which advertisements are producing results, and discontinue poorly performing campaigns.

Set up an email autoresponder for business communication. A company website or a simple capture page is enough to start building an email list of potential customers. Automated systems allow companies to regularly broadcast messages to a large number of people to announce new products, offer discounts, and survey customers. Automation is not just for large companies. Many smaller businesses will benefit from autoresponder to help implement the selected ad campaign.
Study the competition, target advertising to the right groups and run concurrent ad campaigns with an email autoresponder.

Whether your business has an advertising department or chooses to outsource, advertisement is a critical element of retaining customers, improving reputation, and increasing sales.