Begin With End In Mind When Buying Discounted Advertising Space
Imagine you are the managing director of a company and you want to push up your sales revenue. You know you need to get more people looking at your website and visiting your showroom but you only have a limited budget for advertising. Discounted advertising space sounds like something you could use. But only as long as the discounted advertising space comes at price that can be more than recouped in sales revenue.
Discounted advertising space is space in say newspapers, magazines or on broadcast media that doesn’t have a buyer and the timeslot is closing in on the expiry time. It is just like standby fares on an airline where it is better to get some money rather than have the seat left empty.
Successful advertising i.e.; where lookers turn into buyers, is dependent on ensuring that your advert is seen by the right people at the right time. Targeted advertising is undoubtedly what gets the best results. For a campaign to work well you need it to be seen by people that are likely to respond. This is Great advice isn’t it? These are obviously true generalizations but what use are they to the first time buyer of advertising? How can our MD of a widget making company take advantage of discounted advertising space when their expertise is in widgets not buying discount advertising?
The best advise is to begin with where they are and what they want to achieve and then work their way towards what is a good price for them to pay and what is the ‘walk away’ price, above which they just look elsewhere. So for example our widget seller wants a 20% sales increase over the next 3 months. They know from years of successful trading that for every 10 visitors to their website or showroom 3 on average go away having parted with cash.
A key question for any advertiser before they buy advertising space is do they have more than enough stock and or production capacity to meet the predicted surge in demand. Wouldn’t that be a waste of money to achieve your advertising goal but have to disappoint the new customers? Talking of customers, the advertiser is the expert in the subject of what kind of person buys their widgets. So always begin with a description of your client in advertising demographic terms i.e. age, gender, economic status stage of life and so on.
Then when those two ducks, widget supply and widget customer, are in a row you can go in search of advertising media and space that talks to them at the right time. No matter how discounted the advertising space is, if it’s at a time or in a place where your customers aren’t then it isn’t a bargain.
So imagine you know with certainty that x number of your target customers typically read a certain newspaper and you can buy discounted advertising space in that paper. Of the x number who see your advert y number will visit your website or showroom and 30% of y will buy your widgets. Is this likely to give you your target 20% sales revenue increase?
The only duck left for you to put in the row is how much of your profit margin will you pay to acquire that space? The maximum amount you are willing to pay for discounted advertising space is your walk away price. If you can buy it for less than this price, then all well and good. Sit back and let the good tills roll.
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