We all at times get bad marketing advice and are taken for a loop, wasting our time and money. Everyone’s buying it so it must work, we buy into the hype, jump on the bandwagon, and then the results aren’t quite what we expected.
Then we get flushed out and flustered, feel we’ve been duped, then we count our losses and then carry on. There are plenty of marketing and advertising ideas and advice which are floating about, promising to skyrocket your sales overnight, increase your ROI, realizing massive profit margins.
The truth being that the majority of these ideas are pure bunk, but we usually find out the hard way. What most needs is being more aware of the methods of effective advertising. We can and all have become seduced by slick sales pages which outlines outlandish claims, usually available for a limited time, and then we bite, hard.
We think that we’ve discovered the secret that no one else knows about, that we’re ahead of the curve, ahead of the crowd. The thing is that we’ve all heard similar claims before, but time and time, we still fall for it.
To Be Competitive You Need The Lowest Price
You need to ask yourself, do you always buy the most cheapest product that’s on the market, always shop at the store or online retailer which offers the lowest price, most usually don’t.
What most don’t realize is that for many, getting value and quality means a lot. There are a select few however, who’ll just buy the cheapest item, but most understand that cheapest isn’t always the best bang for the buck.
You can try this out yourself on your own product or service. Find a low-cost way of enhancing the perceived value of your product, and then raise the cost slightly. What usually happens is that your sales and profit margins will increase.
Constantly Be Changing Your Ads To Be Relevant
You can’t always be tweaking, just test what works and then stick to it. The strict sole goal of advertising is to attract as many new customers as possible for the least ad expense.
Once you get a new customer to buy or opt-in, then the ad has effectively done its job. That customer then doesn’t need to see that ad again, so just allow the ad do its job for everyone else who hasn’t seen it yet.
This isn’t saying you shouldn’t ever change your ads, but just never abandon something that works. A rule of thumb is to spend 80% percent of your advertising budget on what works, and then use the remaining 20% percent to test ads.
Keep the tried and tested proven ads working for you, while you constantly test the waters for new ideas which might work even better.
The More Options The More Likely They’ll Buy
Some claim that variety is the spice of life, but realize that offering too many choices can usually lead to procrastination. What happens when someone procrastinates is they’ll never get back to what they were originally doing.
Once you get a customer that can’t decide, most often, you’ll lose the sale that you probably had. They came to your site, they liked your product, then what you offered them were too many options.
What you did was you halted and paused them from making up their mind to buy, then they clicked away or walked out so they could think about it, perhaps never to return.
So the key becomes to limit their options and decision to either a “yes” or a “no.” Force them to decide, yes I’ll buy or no I won’t. Don’t risk confusing them and potentially losing the sale.
Everybody Wants My Product So I Don’t Need To Advertise
Generating sales is hard work, there are no free lunches in online marketing or at your physical location. The chances are good that your potential customer needs to be convinced, that they need to buy your product over others.
You need to first profile the customer, then convince them that it’s your product or service that can solve their woes. Then closing the deal out becomes a delicate process. The process is the same for everyone, so don’t think you’re any different. What’s at risk are your profits.
You think that your product is so unique that it has no competition, so you don’t need to advertise. Build it and they will come. So after your initial announcement, you don’t bother to do any advertising whatsoever.
Sales slowly trickle in while you barely covered your expenses. So in a desperate attempt, you begin to splash ads all over the Internet. Then bingo, sales begin to pour in, most saying “I didn’t even know your product existed, but once I saw your ad, I decided to buy right away.”
Face it, the majority of people are lazy. Unless they desperately need something, most won’t bother to go out of their way to search for what they need, your offer.
They know they need something, and will eventually get around to it. What your ad does is it acts as a trigger, a reminder that they need to get something done, get solved. So never shortchange yourself by not advertising.
We’ve all ourselves had personal problems and issues that we wanted to solve for a while, usually without even noticing it, let alone doing anything about it. All we’ve needed is to see an enticing ad to motivate us to get our attention and take action.
There are a few misguided myths when it comes to marketing and advertising which most are fooled by. The key is to weed them out, this since advertising exists because it works.