Too much or too less information

Too much or too less information, both are strict ‘no no’. Many of us wish our advertisements too look absolutely neat, with one creative idea and nothing in it. Many award winning simple advertisements inspire us to do that. But client just don’t like it. He wants you to show his product, talk about its benefits, and display his logo. So make sure you include all important points in your advertisement. On the other hand don’t overstuff your advertisement with too many communication elements making it ugly.

Too many colors

We often think too many bright colors easily grab attention. But too many colors also look repulsive. Don’t use more than two or three colors. Colors should complement each other.

Too stylish and illegible font

Don’t fall in love with fonts that you don’t even notice its drawbacks. Don’t use too stylish calligraphic fonts in your advertisement, they are mostly unreadable. People won’t give an extra effort to understand your advertisement. Keep your font simple, bold, classy yet readable. Don’t use too many types of fonts either. Use one or two types of fonts. Concentrate on font size too. Headline, subhead, body text everything should bear distinctly different font sizes.

Logo larger than life

Often we place brand logo in center of the advertisement, large and really loud. Don’t scream too loud. Often client may ask you to emphasize the most on his logo. But too much emphasized logo won’t not only make your advertisement look ugly but also remain avoided. So keep it visible but not in center of attention.

Next time, you make a print advertisement don’t make these regular mistakes. These tips will help you to overcome these commonly committed mistakes. All the best!

Here are some guidelines for an advertising campaign.

Keep up the similarity

Keeping the theme same is very important, that’s what advertising campaign is all about. Start your advertising campaign with cracking the concept. Ideate a concept, which is truly out-of-the-box. Develop a theme. Don’t forget, this central theme will remain constant all over the campaign. Central idea of the campaign can’t change. Decide on what you wish to say and how you say that. If you have a headline, it will run everywhere. It will be a headline in print ad, a super in television ad and a voice over in radio advertisement. If you have coined a jingle, it will run across all the media too. If you have coined a specific mascot or character, it should be in every advertisement. Tonality, message will be same all over. If your brand seeks a celebrity endorser, make sure you utilize his presence across all media. It may cost more, but that’s rule of campaign, else campaign will fall flat.

Choice of media

An advertising campaign generally runs over a series of media like print, electronic, outdoor etc. Since an advertising campaign aims maximum visibility, brand exposure, awareness and preference it’s generally released over multiple media, making sure people watch it whether knowingly or unknowingly. So make sure you choose a wide variety of media for your ad campaign. Keeping the theme same, your advertisement’s dramatization may vary from one media to another. You may also choose POP media, transit media, specialty media, digital media and the like.

Time of release

Time of release of the advertisement campaign across all the media has to be on the same time, to cast the synergistic effect. Since an advertising campaign is launched to promote something new it comes in all media at the same time. Maximum exposure works magical for the brand.

In the poll, around 35% of the American consumers have said that they will not purchase a brand because the brand had a distasteful advertisement. Another 28% respondents said that they have said that they didn’t buy the product because they did not like the spokesperson used by the brand, while another 27% said they didn’t buy because of the program and event sponsored by the brand.

This poll has given a strong message to the marketers, and now everyone is forced to be diligent in choosing what to say, how to say where to say, and whom to use to say it. In other words, companies will need to be more careful in deciding their advertisement message, creative expression of the message, program and events to sponsor, and brand ambassador to choose.

We have often spoken if a celebrity has an impact on a brand or not. This poll clearly suggests that it does have an effect on consumer purchase. Marketers now need to be cautious in choosing a spokesperson for a brand, and in the light of this poll, running an extensive test run of advertisements is advisable. See image for the poll result.

Only 13% of the US 18 and above adults think that financial services companies are any trustworthy with their ad campaigns. 40% of the US adults between 35 and 44 trust soft-drink advertisements, but only 10% among them trust advertising shown by financial services companies.

Can we read this cue as breaking of “financial security” myth shown by financial institutions?

We must remember that this is the age-group that has to pay for their kids’ education. For complete report, see the image below.

• Investor
• Employee
• Customers

Investor

Investors are a group of people who invest their hard-earned money to get return from your business. They invest in your business because they trust you, and they see hope in your business. Till the time you are fulfilling their expectations, they will keep their money in your business. Hence, you need to keep them apprised of any development in your business. Keep on giving them good news, and your business will be in good shape.

Employee

Your employee is the second pillar of your business. It is your employees only that can make or break your business. Your business solely depends upon their performance to meet the investors’ expectations, and to deliver on the promises made to your customers. It is thus in your best interest that you keep your employee happy. A happy employee will satisfy the needs of many customers, and will present a favorable picture to investors, whereas, a disgruntled employee is a big deal breaker. They will piss everyone off, including you.

Customers

It is the customers for whom you have erected such a giant structure, raised money, and hired so many highly qualified employees. The end goal of your business is to serve this group of people, and all your energy should be channelized to do so. The moment you step away from your path, your business is doomed. Do not let your vision blurred by the shine and sparkles of advertisements and press coverage, you have not achieved anything if you have not served your customer right.

A parting thought

Which one of the three is more important? Well, this is tricky to answer as none of them is more important than rest of the two. You need to make a balance.

Form an equilateral triangle placing each one of them at each corner of the triangle, and you should sit right in the center, equidistant from each one of them.

A residual income keeps a steady sum of money flowing into your account.  This you can save for a rainy day, or spend as you need to, to keep the career going.  Residual income’s usually don’t earn as much as your mainstay, but they are a good supplement.

Think about the opportunities before you.  If you haven’t created a personal blog, you really should consider doing so.  It’s a good way to speak your mind, get noticed, and sell some ad space to make a little extra money.  Every writer should have a personal blog, and even if you don’t have the full time to invest, at least a simple blogspot.com one would suffice.  Combined with Google’s Adsense program, you can make yourself a nice little cash cow.

Try some seasonal opportunities.  There’s always someone out there looking for writers to write copy for season specific events, or advertisements.  Those are decent jobs that are fairly easy to complete, and they pay pretty well most of the time.  It’s a nice easy job that won’t detract from your main projects, but that keeps you writing, as well as earning.

If you have the sort of degree necessary, you could consider teaching other writers.  Many universities offer opportunities for independent teachers.  As long as you have the credentials, you can get paid for your time.  Plus you get exposed to new styles, and have a chance to communicate with other writers.  Now you’re not only earning some side money, but also helping your own writing to grow.

Firstly you want to find out what the most common wage from opposing companies stands at, and match that pay level, so that you can remain competitive.  The most qualified applicants aren’t going to waste their time on a job that would pay them less than if they applied to an opposing company, to do the same job for more money.

Try to find some creative perks that you can offer your new employee hopefuls.  If you’re not a large company, obviously you’re probably going to have to get a bit more creative with what you can offer, but anything that you can manage will only be more positive for the job opening.  Anything that makes your company look better, no matter what you can offer, is always helpful for getting those more desirable applicants.

Make sure to show that there is plenty of room for growth within the company, and that if you work hard you can climb the ladder fairly quickly.  Employees need incentive to take a job and do well at that job, nobody wants to hit a glass ceiling shortly after taking a job, so make sure to outline the benefits your company offers through promotion opportunities.

Have some form of employee incentive program in place to encourage hard work even more.  By offering opportunities for employees to earn more money, or receive some sort of privileges you increase the team morale.  By increasing morale your team is going to work harder.  Showing potential applicants that these opportunities are available will entice them to apply to your company, opposed to a rival corporation.

How to guides

How many times have you searched the Internet to find information on tweaking or fixing errors your operating system or software, or fixing your broken car speaker, or to know about buying insurance, etc.? Each time you search for some information to help you do something or decide something; you are searching for How to Guides. Why not help your visitors by writing such helps in a proper “how to…” style?

Example:

1. How to Find a Right Cell Phone.
2. How to Clean your Carpet.
3. How to Fix your Drycleaner.

Best of/Top 10

Best of something or top ten something is a big attention drawer. Using this type of headlines will pull more visitors to your site then you ever expected. More often than not, the article or blogpost falling under such headlines are written in a list format.

Example:

1. Top Ten Benefits of Yoga.
2. Best Antivirus of 2009.
3. Top Ten Videos of 2009.

Tell the benefits through outright headlines

Sometimes, being direct helps a lot in retaining visitors’ attention. Tell the visitors directly about the benefits he you are going to talk about in the following article. Outright or direct headline can also be used to make a bold statement.

Example:

1. Piano lessons in 30 Days.
2. Make Free Calls Anywhere in the World.
3. Work from Home & Earn Six-Figure Income.

Testimonial Headlines

Testimonials are the best way to state the benefits and sell the product. Advertisers have known this, since always. No wonder there are so many testimonial advertisements in newspapers and television. By using a testimonial headline for your blogpost or article, you will reap the same rewards that advertisers have been reaping for ages.

Example:

1. I Lost 30 Pounds Using This Secret Formula, You can lose too.
2. At First I did not Trust Him, BUT He is the Best Insurance Advisor.

AdSense basically provides revenue by putting advertisements on all web pages of a site or a blog with no additional resources. Setting up AdSense does not require any special skills, it is made in a very customer friendly way so that anyone can follow those easy steps and get started. AdSense delivers the relevant ads according to the content of your site, specifically targeting your site. The words have different meanings in different contexts. AdSense is an intelligent program which understands the context of the content and display ads accordingly.

Google strives to get you the maximum revenue from you web page by pitting two types of ads against each other:

• CPC: Cost per click in which revenue is generated by clicking on the ads.
• CPM: Cost per thousand impressions

Whatever is best suited for your site, is displayed there and generates revenue for you. You can also put search boxes in your site and you will find ads relevant to searches performed by the visitors on your site. Searches also yield money and add to your revenue.

Setting Google AdSense

Setting up Google AdSense requires minimal investment in terms of your time. You only need to send an online application, on approval, you get a code which needs to be pasted in your site’s code and here you are, AdSense ready. AdSense allows you to customize the ads format in terms of space, color scheme, appearance and templates.

Ads for every content

Due to a wide base of advertisers, Google has ads for everyone, however specialized the content may be. Moreover, you have access to thousands of advertisers without bothering to interact with them, Goodle manages this for you. AdSense works according to geography as well resulting in helping local advertisers target their audience.

Premium AdSense Service

If you are one of those who get 20 million page views per month or 5 million searches (the standards may vary), then Google offers you Premium AdSense service which has many facilities as compared to regular AdSense users. One of this is a dedicate Google representative which will help you with optimization and of course more revenue generation. The ads are much more customized and almost completely blended with the content. The sites like LinkedIn, MySpace are under the Google Premium AdSense service and you can have an idea of what it actually looks like.

Google Adsense has something in it for everyone. You can rake mullah with this revenue generation program. All you have to do is generate traffic for your site and Google will take care of the rest.