January
17,
2017
Types Of Advertising
And Why Advertising Is Important.
By Mike Hampson, owner,
Helicopter Links.
San
Diego, California, USA: Advertising is a vital part
of the marketing communications plan for small,
medium and large companies to gain sales, increase
your market
visibility, branding purposes and to stay competitive.
Author Jeffrey I. Richards once said that "creative
with strategy, is called 'advertising'." The
companies who advertise are the ones who let their
buyers know they want to earn their business.
In addition, advertising allows companies
to gain new customers, and also to help
to
bring
back former customers
and remind current customers to place their orders.
When advertising online, it helps
your
company to be visible to buyers who are based
locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.
There are
many ways to advertise today in the helicopter
industry: There are trade shows
(and trade show give-aways), industry magazines,
mailers (can include coupons), flyers, email blasts,
company websites, business cards, word-of-mouth
(referrals),
direct sales, press releases, articles
about your company, blog articles, custom printed
business apparel & products, social media and
online directories,
like Helicopter
Links, to
name
a few.
Trade Shows
Trade shows are valuable
because potential customers and current customers
can see
products close up and/or talk to company employees
and discuss the products. The detraction of
trade shows is the expensive price tag for both
attendees and exhibitors, and in addition, the majority
of attendees of a trade shows are typically only
from a regional
or national audience. In fact, there are many people
who can't attend trade shows due to the cost, bad
timing due to business or personal commitments
or lack of interest in the trade show.
Magazines Industry
magazines are a useful to tool to advertise to buyers
because of their usually large audience but the
detractions include:
1) Magazines talk about readership
numbers. That's because people are picking up the
magazine to read the articles! Believe it or not,
not all people, at the time they are reading a
magazine,
are ready
to
buy
and are not looking at the advertising. The horror!
2) When
a buyer does need to buy, do you think they
look in their stack of helicopter magazines and
start flipping through the pages to find an advertisement?
If a reader sort-of remembers an advertisement,
what's the chance a reader will remember which issue
the
ad
was in? Which magazine
did I see the ad? What page was that ad?
3) Magazine advertising is typically
an expensive proposition for the seller.
My proposition is that a lot of branding
(name recognition) is taking place in magazine
advertising instead of advertising to the buyer
at the exact time the buyer is searching for a seller.
However, because
magazines have a high readership, advertising
can be effective due it being a numbers game (and
lest we not forget, it's very expensive) . What
I find surprising
with
some
the
the multi-billion
dollar
company's ads, is there is usually very little
helpful contact information in the ad. (This either
means
that some
large companies are
advertising in magazines for the sole purpose of
branding their company name or it means the company
doesn't realize that contact information is an important
part of advertising! Who knows?)
Email Blasts
Email blasts are useful when
people open them. The industry standard for a good
open
rate
on email
blasts averages around a 20%. We also
know that even if a person does not open your email
blast, and if your company name is in the "From
Field" for your outgoing email, it does keep
your company name in front of your customers. Therefore,
sending an email without the user opening it, helps
to keep your company name
in front of the customer.
One
of
the detractions
of email
blasts is trying to gain a legal email list.
Who wants to join yet another email list? Legally,
professionally
and ethically, a company should
only email to those on their email list to people
who have opted into the email list. If a company
purchases an email list or adds people
to their company's email list without their
permission, this is quite illegal in the United
States per
the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
Press Releases, Articles,
Blogs
Companies with a big enough
bank account can hire professional writers for their
press releases, articles and blog articles. Sending
a press
release is
not as easy as jotting down some notes about your
company. A good press release follows
a strict AP Standards format and is written by a
professional writer. If you can get a writer from
a helicopter magazine or from Helicopter Links to
write an article about
your company, then this is a great way to get some
good exposure in the helicopter
industry.
If you have a blog for your
company, this is great way to write about your products,
services, customer service, your employees and anything
else you want to write about your company. You can
write on a variety of topics on your own blog.
Direct Mail, Flyers,
Business Cards
Direct
mail is a good way
to keep your company's name in front of new and
current
customers. However,
there is the cost of graphic design, printing, the
stuffing and labeling envelopes, the cost of keeping
a data base and the cost of the postage! And not
every company can afford direct mail to national
or
international addresses. Flyers and business
cards that have
the best look, are typically created by a
graphic designer. A graphic designer also is
responsible for designing the business cards for
your company.
Websites, Custom Printed
Business Apparel, Social Media
Websites today
are somewhat different than they were 10 years ago.
Today, more
people are using mobile devices to look at websites.
Websites which change their size based on the size
of the device the user is using (for example, a
desktop has large screens, a tablet has a smaller
screen
and
mobile
phones have smaller screens), is called responsive
web design. Having a good web designer and a graphic
designer
is a key to having a good and up-to-date website.
A word of caution, there are many new websites which
are lacking key information about things such as
the purpose of a company, product information, history
of the company, key employees of the company, it's
full email address, phone numbers and email addresses.
If your company sells products, it
is highly recommended that you figure out how to
sell your items online. This way, your current customers
and new customers can easily purchase your products.
While there are probably many different types of
technology you can use your company website, I would
always recommend to have Google Analytics on your
site. Google Analytics, sometime called the gold
standard of web statistics, if free to use by medium
to smaller companies and is one of the best web
statistics programs available. Larger corporations
with lots of traffic will need to pay for Google
Analytics.
If you are selling custom business
apparel with your company name and logo on it (such
as t-shirts, jackets, hats, coffee mugs, key chains),
this is yet another way to make some money and have
your employees and customers pay for and do the
advertising for you! Social media is a good way
to keep your name in front of customers because
it's a free
service (unless
you decide to advertise with the social media
company). The only drawback with social media
is you
need to have enough followers to see results
and you must have a staff (which takes the labor
hours
and a strategy, if you really want to make good
use of your social posts), for your company.
Remember to
post
all your
press
releases,
articles
and blog articles on your social media. What I
recommend, is that the social media people keep
a master list of all
your press releases, articles and blog articles
and every time you post an article, make a note
in your master list of the day, month and year you
posted the article. Then you can
plan to repost all the
articles
and
press
releases
which you like the best, every year (or every other
year) or whenever you feel it's appropriate.
Remember to take lots of
picture of your products, office, plant, helicopter(s),
employees, etc., and keep a master file organized
by type of photo. Then every time you post a photo,
you can find it, then remember to put the date (month
and year) inside the file name of the photo. That
way, two (2) months or two (2) years later, when
you post the
same
photo, you know the last time you posted it social
media.
TV, Radio, Newspapers,
Billboards, Transit
There is also TV, radio, local, national
and international newspapers, aviation magazines
(non-helicopter), billboards and transit advertising.
I find that I've seen
very little
of this type of advertising for rotory-wing
because the majority
of their audiences are not in the
helicopter industry.
Creative Advertising
Most
of the
above advertising is called
Creative Advertising. The seller is searching
for the buyer. The buyer is reading a magazine and
then glances over to see advertising. Or a buyer
attends a trade show and a seller has a trade show
booth. The buyer is in their own office and they
receive direct mail from a seller. This is called:
Creative Advertising. (Anything that is not Directory
Advertising is Creative Advertising.)
Directional Advertising (Or
Directory Advertising)
How does a company advertise
to buyers who are searching for sellers? This is
called Directional
Advertising or Directory Advertising. Commonly known
as the yellow pages or with the internet, it's
called a directory.
Helicopter Links is an international
online directory for the helicopter industry, listing
thousands of companies around the world. Helicopter
Links has no printed book because our directory
is online only. (And having a printed book and mailing
it to every helicopter company in the world would
a logistical nightmare and massive drain on our
revenue.)
Companies can advertise anytime throughout
the year
on Helicopter Links website and potential
buyers
can view
your ads, when they are in the buying process,
at their convenience, year-round and worldwide.
According to Google Analytics, about
80% of our visitors find Helicopter Links by using
two (2)
or more
search
terms
in a search
engine. That means that most of our visitors do
not know Helicopter Links by memory. We are actually
very glad about this because this
means that Helicopter Links
website is search engine optimized, meaning
Helicopter Links is easy to find when buyers are
searching for a seller in the helicopter industry.
Our visitors
use Helicopter Links for the
same
reason that
people
use
Amazon or
Ebay. People using Amazon or Ebay are researching
before buying or they are ready to buy. With Helicopter
Links, our visitors are doing the same, researching
before buying or are ready to buy.
Helicopter Links' website has also
been built for ease of use for the visitor. All
companies listed on our site
have "text" listings which translate
easily with our Google Translate button
in the upper-right corner
of every
one of our webpages. We recognize there are about
196 countries in the world, which is why we use
the Google Translate free service on our site.
We also have an easy-to-use
Site Map (just like the index pages of a printed
yellow
page
book)
to help our visitors find companies they are looking
for.
When people are searching online for
products and services, they are on a mission. People
on Helicopter
Links website are doing the same. They are on a
mission looking for businesses who want to earn
their business. We offer one free listing to every
helicopter related website around the world. Therefore,
when a company advertises on Helicopter Links with
banner ads, they typically get many more click-throughs
on their ads than those companies with just one
free listing.
I hope this article helps you have
a better understanding of advertising. And
for those
people who purchase advertising, we hope you'd
like to call us and find out more about our advertising
options and pricing. Please
feel free to call or
email
us in the United States at +1
(858) 413-7074 or staff@helicopterlinks.com. Helicopter
Links is located in San Diego, California, USA.
-End article.
Back
to 2017 news stories
|