10 Ways To Improve Sales Through Effective Advertising

Closing sales is a crucial aspect of your business. Without it, you have no business. However, from a business perspective, the sales process actually starts with marketing.

Marketing can be defined as the business of generating good leads. However, savvy marketers do not rely on slick strategies, gimmicky tactics, or finding a perfect list broker to get a steady stream of targeted leads into a business funnel. Instead, they focus on things that have been proven to work for centuries: effective advertising.

Without marketing, there are no prospects, and without sales, there is no conversion of prospects into customers. So, think of good sales as a team sport where sales and marketing work together like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

With that in mind, here are 10 ways to generate more leads through advertising:

1. Advertise where your customers hang out. Few consumers wake up in the morning with a strong desire to find out how to get their hands on your products or services. They are usually oblivious that your company exists. In order to catch their attention, you must cast your net over the waters where they swim. This is done by figuring out what media your target market uses most often. For instance, what blogs are your targeted audience most likely to read or what social media are they likely to use?
2. Advertise over a long enough period. In order to test your advertising, you have to do it for a consistent period of time to gather any significant information about its efficacy. You will get bored and restless over your advertising long before most of your potential customers even see it. So stay the course and give your ad time to do its job before pulling it and trying something new.
3. Advertise in a unique way. If you’re advertising online, then don’t just rely on PPC, Facebook ads, or banners. While these methods work, customers have also become adept at looking away from blatant advertising. They come online to review information rather than read ads. That’s why the RevTap CAPTCHA advertising solutions take a different approach, effective advertising to target audiences when they are filling out a CAPTCHA form to get access to a website.
4. Advertise quickly and effectively. For ads to be effective they must be read quickly and comprehended just as fast. According to research, the human attention span online is now eight seconds, which means that it’s now only second longer than that of a goldfish. Excess verbiage, obscure graphics, and vague hints will not work. Your marketing message has to be delivered fast, and it has to be spelled out clearly.
5. Advertise with metrics. Unless you have some way of measuring your ads, you won’t know what’s working and what’s merely wasting money. You need strong metrics, not a gut feeling for what might be working.
6. Advertise with a clear goal. Think of your advertising as a scientific experiment. In order to test a hypothesis, you must have some clear goals on what it is that you’re hoping to achieve.
7. Advertise using clear words and relevant graphics. It’s important to step away from what you want for your business and think of what needs and wants your customer might be trying to satisfy by responding to your effective advertising. For instance, how you describe your product or service may make perfect sense to you, but appear to be obscure jargon to your customer. Do customers understand what you’re saying? Do they know what you’re offering them? Is it something that they want, need, or desire?
8. Advertise benefits. Forget features, and only talk about benefits. Advertising has to be done quickly for it to be done. While features may be important, customers first want to know what your product or service will do for them. Only once they’re satisfied that your offer is relevant and useful will they then wonder how it works. Since you have only a limited space for your ad, focus on benefits. Customers can then find out the details when they get to your website.
9. Advertise to gauge response rate. Sweat the small stuff. Spend time creating your ad, reviewing your metrics, split testing, and tweaking. An ad is a response-getting mechanism, and it’s not enough to just create a clever ad. You must watch it like a hawk to see what happens, how it happens, and when it happens.
10. Advertise at the right time. Don’t forget the element of time. When are people most likely to see your ad and when do you want them to take action on it? It’s said that there is a time and place for everything, and this includes ads. The right ads served at the right time will deliver results. However, the right ads shown at the wrong time might as well be the wrong ads.