by Ron Meldrum
"Why aren't my banners pulling?"
This must be one of the most common questions anyone asks after they've first wet their feet in on-line advertising. An advertiser runs 5,000 or so banners and then puzzles over why they didn't get any sales from it, or why there were just a handful of click-throughs.
After all, if 5,000 people saw the ad, shouldn't there be lots of extra visitors to the web site?
There are a number of answers to this question. This is the first in a series of articles designed to help answer that question. These articles are intended to help those with little or no advertising experience to develop effective on-line advertising campaigns.
It doesn't matter what your web sites is, or even whether or not you are selling anything. The concepts are the same whether you are giving away Bible studies, want more users in your discussion forums, or selling T-shirts.
For the purpose of these articles, let's create a fictitious example.
Let's say that Joe Smith has a computer sales and service company, and Joe wants to do some advertising. As a novice marketer, Joe thinks "I'll spend $30 to buy 5000 banners and make back $60 on my investment." So, Joe pulls out his graphics software and creates a banner that says "Joe Smith Computer Service: quality is our business" and sends it off to the web site where he is advertising. In a few days the banner runs through all 5000 displays and Joe looks at his server logs and sees that he got 15 visitors from the banner - and no sales.
Joe says, "what a lousy web site to advertise on. I'm never going to waste my money there again." And, he finds another web site and repeats the process with virtually the same results.
After doing this 2-3 times, Joe throws up his hands in despair, concluding that on-line advertising just doesn't work.
Joe's experience is shared by perhaps 95% of the people who are trying to promote their web sites on the Internet. Maybe even you have been there yourself. So, let's look at Joe and his predicament and see what went wrong.
To do this, we need to begin at the beginning. Most of us (myself included) really jumped ahead of where we should have been when we started advertising on-line. In my case, I sank a lot of time, effort, and money into banner ads before I even took the time to answer the first question one needs to address:
"Why do I want to advertise?"
The answer really seems obvious: to get more people to my web site; to make more money; to give away more Bible studies hat will help more people. Ultimately, that's our goal, right?
But, when we start a new banner campaign, we have to be more specific than that. When I put a banner on XYZ web site, I need to answer the question "What do I want that banner to do for me?"
Just like in print advertising, there are two basic motivations or goals for running an ad.
The "Branding" Ad
One type of ad you might run is a "branding" ad. This type of ad is designed to promote your "brand," which could be your company name, your URL, the title of your web site, or even your own name. The goal of the "branding" ad is to build familiarity and credibility with your audience - to establish a reputation with people who have never heard of you before.
It's unlikely that any prospect, no matter how qualified and well-matched for you, will actually click on your ad the first time they see it. The experts vary in their opinions - some say that a prospect needs to see your ad three times before they will click on it; some say seven times. I even heard someone recently say that the number was 21 times.
Whatever the number is, the idea is the same. One of the most important motivations (we'll talk more about motivations for clicking in a later article) for someone clicking on an ad is trust. And, just like in other areas of life, trust grows from familiarity. The more a prospect sees your ad, the more likely they will be to feel that you have something of value to offer them.
Even the wicked understand this concept. Adolf Hitler is famous for saying, "Tell a lie often enough, loud enough, and long enough, and people will believe you." He was right. Governments and political leaders do this all the time, even today, even in our own country.
When someone sees your advertisement, they don't know if what your ad says is a lie or the truth. However, the more times they see your ad and your message, the more confidence they will have in it and the more likely they will believe your message. It's a simple fact of human nature: familiarity leads to trust. The more someone sees your message and the more prominently you promote it, the more they will trust it.
Another value to the "branding" type of advertising is that people who may not have an immediate need for your service at the time they see your ads will be more likely to remember your name or web site when they DO have a need for what you offer.
In the example we used at the beginning of this article, Joe Smith placed a banner ad. Although he did not know it, the ad that he created was a "branding" type of ad. It read "Joe Smith Computer Service: quality is our business" - a message designed to build confidence and reputation, not to initiate an immediate transaction.
When people first saw Joe's ad, they probably disregarded it because they did not presently have a need for his services. Not everyone has an immediate need for what you have to offer. But, if Joe had continued to run his "branding" ad to the same audience, he would have found that as he made people more familiar with his services, those people would begin to think of him when they DID need his services - even without an ad in front of them.
And, that's when advertising really begins to pay off. When you have made people familiar enough with your product that they remember you when they encounter a need ore desire for what you have to offer, then you could actually stop spending money on advertising for a while (if you wanted to) and still get visitors or customers coming your way.
In fact, even in the print world it is rare that an advertising purchase pays for itself with an immediate return. Microsoft doesn't buy a $7,000 color ad in a computer magazine and expect to make all of that money back the day the magazine hits the newsstands. They're planting seeds. They're thinking long-term by building familiarity and trust with the magazine's audience.
The "Transactional" Ad
The second basic type of ad is what we'll can the "transactional" ad. This type of ad seeks to compel the audience to do something specific. This desired action could be:
The transactional ad is a little harder to design. You're not just telling people what you want them to believe about you. While in a "branding" ad you are essentially waving and saying, "Hi, how do you do today? I'm a nice person," in a "transactional" ad you are saying, "hey, come here and give me your money" or "come here and sign my petition." You're asking people to DO something instead of just looking. This is much more challenging.
Now, if you have waved and said "Hi" every day for a month, it will be a whole lot easier to get someone to trust you and perform a transaction with you than if you had just come out of the blue.
Let's illustrate this a little further. Let's say you ride the bus to work every day. Almost every time you get on the bus you see Robert. You don't really know him, but day after day you see him and exchange pleasantries. You get the impression that Robert is a very nice guy. One morning, Robert says to you that he left his lunch at home and wants to know if he could borrow $20. Most of us would probably loan (or even give) him the money.
Compare that scenario to one where a fellow whom you have never seen before gets on the bus and announces, "Hey, I left my lunch at home. Can anyone loan me $20?"
With whom would you be more likely to make that $20 transaction? With the fellow you see day after day and are familiar with, who you know to be a "nice fellow," or with the person who you had never seen before and had no basis for trusting?
The first fellow, Robert, is the company or web site that branded itself. They built familiarity and trust and they communicated to you that they had some really good qualities. When it came time to ask for a transaction, it was easy. The "selling" had already been done.
The second fellow - the one you had never seen before - is the transactional ad with no "branding". There is no basis for trust or familiarity. This type of ad will be a "hard sell" and won't be nearly as fruitful as a transactional ad that was preceded by branding.
When we think of advertising on-line, most of us think of the transactional type of ad and never give a thought to the importance of branding. We have our eyes on that thing we want people to do (visit our web site, make a purchase, etc.) and think we can do it with one ad.
In a future article in this series, we will deal more thoroughly with the elements of a successful transactional ad. For now, pick up a magazine and flip through the pages looking at the ads. See if you can spot which ones are designed for "branding" (for building familiarity, reputation, and trust) and which ones are designed to get you to perform some immediate action, such as buying their product.
Author Information:
Ron Meldrum has been a professional web developer since 1995, working in higher education, healthcare, and e-commerce settings. Today, Ron works as a freelance web developer and consultant. He also pastors a small church in Maine and serves as chairman of the Board of Directors of Hope Haven Gospel Mission, a faith-based homeless shelter/soup kitchen/rehabilitation program in Lewiston, Maine. For more about Ron, see http://www.RonMeldrum.com/
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