image credit: ansy

Response to advertising is hard to measure, especially when running print, radio, or TV ads. However, the great thing about the Internet is the ability to measure and track clicks and responses. This doesn’t mean that other forms of advertising are not important, though. Remember that not everyone spends hours on the Internet, and many still use traditional media as a source for information.

I have always thought about advertising as brand reinforcement. In my corporate and personal experience, as soon as the advertising efforts stopped, we noticed a significant drop in revenue, visits, or whatever it was that we were measuring. Additionally, we noticed our sales began to decline. We couldn’t put our finger on any campaign specifically being the most successful, but we knew it was the repetition and brand presence that was bringing us traffic and eventually converting to sales.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should go out and get a full-page ad in a magazine and book ad space on a bunch of websites. What this means is that you should take a good, hard look at your target audience and plan accordingly. Since you likely don’t have the budget of a multi-million dollar corporation, you cannot afford to blindly purchase ad space anywhere. So, go out and find out what your target audience is reading and clicking on and you will get much better results.