Testing Print Ads

Paul Harvey

I place a new advert recently in a local publication, I am not really into print advertising however the target was a local market and this looks like the best option. I was talking to another marketer Alex (justtoobusy) about the ad. When I mentioned that I was preparing a landing page she was blown away. “I had never thought of doing that” 

Its funny I think it is obvious, but it is just not done by most people, Look in the yellow pages or the newspaper, most companies send potential clients to their home page.  

The key to successful marketing is testing and finding opportunity to measure result of actions. The same opportunity exists with print advertising, by directing customers to a unique page that has no other incoming links it gives you some tracking as the only traffic arriving at the page will come from your advert. .

The second point is that you can keep the print advert sharp or cryptic as there is more information on the web page. The people arriving at the web page are qualified they have been motivated to an action. Now the page can continues the conversation with more information and content you have the opportunity to lead the customers to your desired action. With all of this in place you can watch the traffic hit the site using your analytics package. 

Some might say that people will not bother to type in the URL the tip here is to keep it simple and add a word at the end that is attractive like.  “Profit” or “Free” (as long as you are, giving something away.) This coaching page has just 3 letter “pro.html”  www.market-that.com/pro.html   It needs to be a relatively short URL as people will make mistakes or just do a search.

As with any process there is a caveat in some markets people do not have a computer in front of them as frequently as a phone and are not as computer literate. As with everything, the customer has to be type that will follow an action. You only find this out by testing.

However If you can create web pages and upload them yourself and that is easy on a blog like this then you have a tool for testing print adverts and even if you have to ask the web master to create a new page for you the value will out weigh the cost.

There is more to testing it helps you tune the sales process fast, some of the techniques are specific to your market as a Marketing coach I work with clients to take the sales process apart and test each bit. We are looking to generate numbers to measure performance testing is part of the process. Give me a call lets create some numbers for your sales process.

Every success to you in your business

Paul Harvey

Telephone  0203 287 6962                Skype Market-that