Marketing And Advertising With A Poor Man's Budget, Small Business

By Author: John Reed
Total Articles: 65
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Marketing and advertising is the life blood of business. Without it, business ventures would simply fail. If no one knows about your product are service, they certainly cant buy it.

Having said that, there are a lot of marketers that seek to market and advertise their products, but end up with little success.

They apply all of the marketing tactics they have learned by observing other marketers and still arent able to break through the impenetrable barrier that prevents them from reaching success.

What these marketers dont know is that the people they are watching for guidance are either pumping in large amounts of cash to get noticed or they are failing also. If what I have written so far seems to correlate with what you have been experiencing, this is where you need to pay the closest attention. You are not alone.

At first glance, that statement seems to assure you that philosophically there are others in the same failing marketing tactics boat with you. While there are many that are failing at marketing just like you are, that really isnt what I was getting at.

When I say that you ...
... are not alone, I mean that there are more people trying to get the attention of the same people that you are. These other marketers may not offer the same type of product that you offer but they are all competing with you nonetheless. See, ATTENTION is what every product marketer wants for his or her product or service. Unfortunately, ATTENTION is governed by time. There is only so much time in a day that a potential customer can devote to considering a product and every marketer in the world is fighting for that small block of time slot in the potential customers mind.

This window of time is so important that to miss it often means the marketer looses the sell. Compounding the problem for advertisers and marketers that find themselves in an ever-growing competition for the ATTENTION window, is the fact that the attention window is not a stable block of time. It shrinks and grows erratically as the potential customer deals with the vicissitudes of life.

For instance, lets take a person that plays golf a lot. That is the perfect person to send a sales pitch for a new style golf club right? Not necessarily. What if you pitch the sale on August 19 and he is dealing with problems with his son getting into trouble on that same day? His golf game is a very low priority at that point and his window for carefully considering a product is very small or non-existent all together. I am not saying that it has to be something quite that drastic. It could also be something as simple as the potential customer being tired after having worked long hours. I am just making the point that timing is very important in marketing and advertising campaigns. It makes a very big difference in how deeply your product will be considered and how much time the product sales pitch will be given by the potential customer.

When a potential customer is distracted by the desire to learn more about his/her original search engine search, they dont pay attention to ad placements that interrupt them. Here is a test, on the last 3 websites that you visited, what did the banner ads on those pages say? Cant remember? That is exactly my point. You didnt ask for those ads so memory of them is difficult to maintain. OK..here is an easy one. On your last search engine use, what was the top 5 domains that appeared on the ads to the right of the search results page? Still nothing? Again, that is my point. We instinctively tune out and forget those ads because subconsciously they are often interruptions to what we really are looking for. Dont limit your ad placement to that type of attention seeking. If you do, you have a high chance of mediocre results.

When internet surfers are interrupted by an ad, most times they ignore it, other times they click over and click back in seconds. The pattern of visiting a website and only staying for a few seconds before leaving can be noticed in the website logs. When this is happening to your website it is frustrating, to say the least, because you know that it takes more than a few seconds to read the information that you have provided about your product. Then, what happened? The ATTENTION window shut very quickly and that customer was long gone before you could grab their attention.

In the above analogy, how long the attention window remains open is crucial. How crucial? Companies spend billions of dollars per year researching and implementing plans to prop that window open and hold that window open long enough to have their products and services carefully considered and remembered. Much of that money is wasted testing flawed theories. Thats enough bad news. Lets get to the part where I tell you the solution to this problem. The solution is simple. First, stop following the herd when it comes to marketing. In its self it is not a bad thing. It is just that many marketing and advertising campaigns have failed due to attempting to make a big splash using already over-saturated marketing techniques. Remember, only so many ads can successfully get through the attention window. The task is to get the potential customer to see your ad coming and fully open the window until your product has been properly consider.

The art is to be innovative with your marketing efforts. For instance, a new advertising website TypoBounty dot com uses a patents pending method called error marketing to create and maintain the open window scenario. By conditioning the visitors prior to them arriving on the advertisers website, TypoBounty dot com helps advertisers receive more attentive and focused web traffic. The potential customers come looking for an error on the advertising web property for a small reward. In an effort to find errors, they read every word on your website, resulting in them staying longer and catching the full impact of your sales pitch. The customer remains focused on understanding what you have to say and offer and the ATTENTION WINDOW remains wide open longer for interaction with the customer.

To summarize be innovative and be willing to embrace the new marketing techniques early in the game or you will find yourself in the same spot in a year from now. Catch advertising angles while they are new and reap the benefit of boldly going where noAwe you get the idea.