We ran a display ad in the closest big city newspaper on the weekend. Click here for the ad (it’s a pdf file).
Three- (3) things we considered when we ran our ad:
* A professional services firm needs to generate leads
* A firm like ours doesn’t generate leads via advertising
* We do generate leads from our web site
Having said all that, we always try different things so we tried advertising to generate visitors to our web site which would, in turn, generate leads for our business.
It worked well (which surprised me a bit. I actually think the ad is way too cvheesy.). We have meetings all this week and next with potential clients interested in marketing and web work.
Who saw our ad – we advertised in the business section of the newspaper. Obviously those more likely to be interested in business will read the business section.
We did a few things differently with this ad. We didn’t give a great call to action. We didn’t provide an incentive. We didn’t talk about benefits.
But what we did do was generate the type of people we want as clients to our web site (from where they contacted us). And getting business is what you want your advertising to do.
Regards
Brendon
(taken from www.tailored.com.au August 2003)