Advertising should help drive sales. Good advertising does this. Ineffective advertising doesn’t. When you’re spending money on your marketing, you want to get the most from it.

Branding vs Advertising

Large national corporations spend a lot of money and time building their brand image. Think Coca-Cola or Apple. Nike or Starbucks. As a local business, your marketing budget is limited, and while you always want to be thinking about your business’s image, you need your advertising and marketing to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Investing in brand or image advertising is too expensive for a smaller business, and it’s generally impossible to track accurately.

Just Do It (or Do Something)

Even when big companies are building their image, they’re also providing a call to action. McDonald’s rarely advertises without a call to action to buy a meal or take advantage of a special offer. Even Nike, which generally pushes image over offer, makes buying their brand so enticing that it’s essentially a call to action. Your advertising and marketing need to get the customer or viewer to act. That action is trackable.

The Wrong Call

We’ve established the importance of the call to action, but you need to be careful to make it an effective call.

Here are some CTA mistakes to avoid:

You’re overwhelming users with too many options.
Boiling your CTA down to a simple action is best.

Your CTAs are hard to find.
Make them prominent in your advertising materials.

Your CTAs aren’t optimized for mobile.
More and more consumers are doing business with their phones. Optimizing your ads for mobile is essential.

You’re not using the right language.
You want to write copy that taps into psychology. This is key to driving sales.

Your form is too long and too complicated
As with most things, keeping it simple is the best option. Don’t make your customers work too hard to take advantage of the offer.

Unique Selling Point

What makes your business different from your competitor’s? It might be location. But what if your competitor is also a local business? What sets you apart? Do you have special expertise in a particular area? Do you help a specific demographic? Let’s look at realtors as an example. All realtors service Muncie, but what sets each apart? Maybe one has expertise in selling in Yorktown, the Ball State community, or a specific school district. Each of these are unique selling points. To stand out, you need your own unique selling point.

Keeping Track

Whatever you’re offering in your ad should be trackable. If it’s a billboard or a flyer or a web ad, you can include a web address that customers can access, even if it’s just for information. Then have them fill out a contact form to access the material. This is called a lead magnet. It’s a proven way to make your advertising pay for itself, become trackable, and generate leads. As we all know, generating leads is crucial to growing your business.

Let’s end with a simple call to action: Contact Farmhouse Creative for all your marketing needs.