B Squared Ads

Posts Tagged ‘newspaper advertising’

You’ve spent the money, you’ve generated traffic (or sales) and now you want to know what worked and what didn’t in terms of your advertising dollars. So now what?

In general, we advise clients to use traffic reports as a guide — not gospel — when evaluating media plans, as not all media is created equal.

For instance, magazine advertising is generally used for image building and branding. If you didn’t get a large response of people reporting that they saw your ad in one of the various magazine pubs you used, don’t be surprised.

Newspaper advertising is highly ranked, because people tend to report the reason for their visit (or sale) based on the last thing they saw or what they had seen most often. Since newspaper advertising is run frequently, people remember the ads more often.

Also, people may have seen or heard your television ad, radio spot or saw your banner ad, but if it wasn’t the last thing they remember it most likely will not register as the impetus for their action. This also explains why signage is most often sited as a traffic generator. Typically, advertising signage is the last thing a respondent sees before taking action.

Another consideration is that repeat customers may claim the reason for their purchase or visit is because they are already clients. Keep in mind that your radio ad, television ad, web banner, email, signage, school flyer’s, etc. may have prompted their most recent action.

Advertising works best when it is part of a wide media mix, enabling you to reach as many people as possible in as many ways as possible. This is why your entire advertising budget should never be allocated to a single medium. (And yes, that includes the web.)

Debt. Foreclosure. Buyer’s market. It’s all encapsulated in the last few years in a climate that has been very unkind to people trying to sell real estate. We keep hearing on a national level how everything is down: prices and sales. It’s all bad news, right? Especially in states like Florida, which has been one of the hardest hit by the sour economy.

But things seem to be turning around – and there appears to be a good lesson to be learned from developments in Broward County – more significantly, how a target market was reached and how this project witnessed and is witnessing a mini boom amidst the many crashes of the last several years.

It’s not a story, to borrow the phrase, of: “If you build it they will come.’ It’s more like, “If you give them a good product at a good price and advertise using the right vehicles, they will come.”

This particular community of single family homes ranging from the $200s up to the low $500s, has sold 160 homes since January. The product is attractively priced and amenities understated, but delivering a good house at a good price has developed an audience clamoring for it.

Likewise, in Sarasota, a single-family-home community with pricing in the low $100s launched in mid July through conventional advertising: direct mail and newspapers, as well as online ads, driving 5,000 people through the community thereby acting as a bullet against the current real estate slog with numbers not seen in the past four years. Since the grand opening the developer has penned and closed more than 50 contracts.

What is the gist of all this? Obviously, in this market you have to have the right product. Who could imagine homes starting at $120,000 after the real estate circus of several years ago? Better yet, who would have thought that newspaper advertising would drive in 200 people a week through the doors?  200 people who were primarily under the age of 35. Newspaper advertising constituted one half of the developer’s media dollars. Risky? Apparently not.

And who would have thought that people still read newspapers? Especially our Generation Xers. Well, if these two communities are any indication, traditional advertising still works, but it needs to be coupled with new media. Above all, you need to make sure the messaging is right on all fronts: right for the audience, right for the product and right for the medium.