If a company intends to sell a new product to any potential customer, this customer needs to know about that. The propaganda activities, in general, have this purpose, to announce products and services. If someone intends to announce something to his target customers, he has different medias available, like radio, TV stations, newspapers, magazines, posts, billboards, blogs, web sites, etc. However, to be successful, it is necessary to take care about some details. First of all, the company has to select the best media channel, with highest probability to access the target group. You should not post an ad in a fishing equipment’s magazine if you work with software’s development and vice-versa.
Another point to be consider is the advertise attractiveness. In general, people take a magazine to read articles, not to pay attention in the magazine ads. Therefore, it is necessary to post creative, intelligent and interesting ads, in order to capture the attention of the target customers, as well as to make them memorize the message and the brand.
A mnemonic rule for a good ad is built by the initials AIDA, what means that the ad need to be good enough to capture the Attention for reading, to promote the Interest, to raise the Desire and to move people for Action. To achieve that the ad’s images as well as words and texts must be challenging enough to motivate the customer for buying. It’s necessary to emphasize the great benefits, to encourage people to take a favorable purchasing decision.
The ad positioning within the magazine pages should be strategic in order to capture the customer attention in a most favorable way. The reading exercise use to move from left to right and the eyes movement goes down declining in diagonal direction. These are just some details to be considered to locate figures and photos, for example. The full page, the double pages in the middle of the magazine, front and back cover use to be most visible to the readers.
Smaller ad’s, 1/3 page without creativeness, for example, denotes lack of expertise besides to evoke the I mage of a small company, what uses to considerate an ad as a cost not as an investment. One ad printed in just one magazine edition, could be not perceived. Thus it is important to keep the ad for minimum 3 or 4 impressions in order to provide necessary time to be noticed and memorized. The advertising should be an invitation to action. Passive ad’s, only informative ones, which do not express the real benefits of a product or service could be unfruitful. It is better to produce imperative and affirmative ad’s than the opposite. The ad’s must be an invitation to the success and must be composed by positive messages. It must be clear, objective and must emphasize the unique sales proposition, the great benefit of the product or service. Who try to emphasize everything, emphasizes nothing. So, the images and words must be very well elected to make the readers touched by the message, in order to become effectively customers.
If a company keeps the same ad for a long time, as the time passes by, slowly, even a good message starts loosing effect. The brains use to react when touched by new inputs, messages and images that it doesn’t recognize. Thus, due to that, it is recommended to change ad’s (images, photos, texts) with a certain frequency. Old ads could transfer to readers and customers the idea of an obsolete organization.
Each media asks for specific communication strategy. To create an ad for a magazine is completely different than to create one for a web environment. A successful strategy in one media could be null in another one. There are a lot of alternatives in marketing literature and there are many agencies to support companies in developing good ad’s campaigns. However, to those ones which have no money to invest in such activities, it is recommended to make use of sensibility and logic thinking to take care of this subject by themselves.
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Marcondes 2012/Oct/ 01