Local & national press adverts designed to maximise your return on investment

There are proven dos and don'ts when designing press adverts and Quiet Storm abide by these when setting about the design of your press advert. Things like:

Text reversed out of black sells less than text black on white
On average five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy, so your headline should sell your product, ideally including its brand name for greater recall
Adverts with lots of well written copy usually out sell those with less copy
If your product is aimed at a small group of people, name them and ensure you draw their attention in the headline - like 'electronics engineer's dream...' or 'XYZ... gardener's best friend'.
If your adverts are in local papers then you get better results if you include the name of the town or city in the headline

The point is this - do you want us to break the mould or follow these, and other, proven rules?

Local and national press is primarily focused on the business to consumer (B2C) advertising proposition, and although our focus is B2B communication, we do have considerable experience in this area. The key to advertising in the press, be it local or national, is frequency and this requires a larger financial commitment. It should only be undertaken if there is a clear well-formed strategy and a single-minded proposition.

There must be an effective way of monitoring all of the opportunities arising, down to a specific advert in a specific publication - the same advertisement may perform differently in different publications, different positions, and different days. This feedback will help you to manage your budget and maximise your return on investment.

As these publications are in the main, daily, it is imperative that the results are measured accurately and in real-time - it's no good finding out that your advert is not performing on certain days, certain pages or in certain publications when your budget is gone.

Measuring the performance of your advert

By phone: Non-geographic telephone numbers (for example those with a 0870 prefix) which forward on all calls made to your number and in doing so register every enquiry made by telephone, including the time of day and any 'dropped' or 'unanswered calls'. Quiet Storm is able to offer you this service, providing an accurate measure of all telephone enquires generated by your advert.

Through your website: Driving readers to your web page will create expectations and your web page must deliver the information they seek. The web address should be unique to the advert enabling all visits to be recorded. When at the web page there should be an offer. Your offer will require that they 'complete this web form to receive...' providing you with valuable customer profile information. Quiet Storm can create online landing pages so that you may have an accurate measure of all web traffic and enquires generated by your advert.

Physical evidence: Vouchers or 'present this advert for...' help monitor 'through the door' traffic. This very much depends upon the services or products you offer but is one of the ways you can measure the physical response to your advert.

Prospect list

Anonymous readers have no value - so you need to develop strategies that make readers willingly supply you with information. Every advert can build a prospect list.

Research & testing

It may be that the advert gets lucky first time but more often than not to get 'the best performing advert', in the 'best performing position' and the 'best performing day of the week' will involve testing and this must be allowed for when planning your campaign.

Research will limit guesswork to a minimum. For instance according to research carried out web is the strongest* response channel. (Web = 60%, Telephone = 20%, Voucher = 20%). So publish an URL in your advert!

* Source: UK marketing campaigns during 2004

If you are interested in talking to Quiet Storm about your press advertising click here.