Advertising Ideas

Advertising is impersonal, usually paid communication intended to inform, educate, persuade, and remind.

Advertising is a sophisticated form of communication that must work with other marketing tools and business elements to be successful. Advertising must be interruptive — that is, it must make you stop thumbing through the newspaper or thinking about your day long enough to read or hear the ad. Advertising must also be credible, unique, and memorable in order to work.

And finally, assuming the actual advertising is built upon a solid positioning strategy, enough money must be spent to provide a media schedule for ad frequency, the most important element for ad memorability.

Word-of-mouth advertising. Word-of-mouth advertising has existed as long as mankind has communicated and traded goods and services. Word-of-mouth advertising is considered the most effective form. Word-of-mouth has the desired qualities of strong credibility, high audience attention levels, and friendly audience reception. It features open-ended conversation with questions and answers about the product, psychological incentives to purchase, memorability, efficiency and frequency. Word-of-mouth advertising passes product information to many other potential buyers (and may even include promotional trial demonstrations and free sampling), at little or no cost to the business. Whenever possible, a small business should build an advertising program that results in word-of-mouth advertising! Satisfied customers are your best advertisements.

In some respects, typical media advertising (e.g., the Miller Light "less filling/more taste" ads) acts only as a catalyst to achieve word-of-mouth advertising and increased sales. Successful advertising will achieve many times more ad mentions through word-of-mouth than the number of paid media presentations of the ads.

To build an effective advertising campaign, consider the following:

• Our advertising checklist provides guidelines for creative, memorable ads.
• Advertising media discusses the major types of ads used by small businesses.