by Jay Abraham, author, The Sticking Point Solution

It's all about leverage

If advertising is currently your main driver of sales, you can make surprisingly minor and easy changes in your existing advertising that will produce major results – and you won’t have to spend a dime. There are several  leverage factors at your immediate disposal, each of which can increase sales 20 to 500 percent:

1. Write great headlines: No matter how good the rest of your ad is, your audience won’t ever see it if they don’t get past the headline. Your headline must telegraph to your prospects the biggest, most appealing specific benefit or payoff they can expect to receive. It must be catchy and contain key words that will pop up from the page.

2. Set yourself apart: Distinguish your business from every other competitor by addressing an obvious void in the marketplace that you alone can honestly fill. Set your prospects’ buying criteria for them, so that only you, your business, or your product can clear the bar. Focus on one specific, relevant niche that is most sorely lacking in the marketplace and make it your own.

3. Offer proof to build your credibility: Provide substantiation for your claims, including client testimonials, quotes from experts, and excerpts of media articles about your product. Contrast your performance, construction, or support with the competitions’.

4. Reverse your customers’ risk: Put the onus on yourself. Tell your clients that you’ll offer a full refund, or at least some element of the transaction. Taking the burden of risk off a client will result in higher (and quicker) sales.

5. Include a call to action: Now that your audience has read your ad, don’t make their next step ambiguous. Tell them exactly what to do, why to do it, what benefits they can expect – and what penalties or dangers will result from delay. “Call now!” “Visit our store!” Such phrases may sound old school, but they’re still in use for a reason.

6. Offer a bonus: Whether it’s a coupon, a discount, an extended warranty, or the promise of preferential treatment, a bonus on top of your already fabulous product or service proposition can only further entice and multiply sales. “Be one of the first to join and receive a free companion book!”

7. Summarize your offer: By summarizing your offer at the end of your ad, you are seizing the moment to “Bring it home”:  Reiterate the problem you are able to solve, the benefits your buyers will gain, and the upside with no downside. Then tell them again how to act now.

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Jay Abraham, author of The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business From Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, is founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc., in Los Angeles, California and has spent the last twenty-five years increasing the bottom lines for over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries worldwide.

Learn more about Jay Abraham at www.abraham.com

Reprinted with permission.

Research shows that companies that consistently advertise even during recessions perform better in the long run. A McGraw-Hill study looking at 600 companies from 1980 to 1985 found that those businesses which chose to maintain or raise their level of advertising expenditures during the 1981 and 1982 recession had significantly higher sales after the economy recovered. Companies that advertised aggressively during the recession had sales 256% higher than those that did not continue to advertise.

With that in mind, Neil Raj, Director of AdCommunal Inc., has provided a list of the Top 10 Tips for Advertising Online in a Bad Economy.

Here are Neil’s tips:

1. Understand your audience. Choose an advertising approach that best suits your goals, and select an agency that can deliver to your goals.
2. Pay for leads, not impressions or clicks. The best way to do this is through a performance-based program where you pay a set amount per lead generated; regardless of how many times the ad is shown or clicked on.
3. Maximize your investment. Not only does a lead-based performance approach generate leads, it provides free brand visibility through banner placements and free site visibility through clicks, while generating leads that you can contact repeatedly.
4. Avoid set-up fees. There is no reason for you to pay set-up fees for your online campaign. If an ad agency tries to charge you set-up fees, look elsewhere.
5. Look for exclusivity. Most advertising agencies will tell you that they do not handle competing accounts – check if the agency has a smaller division or a separate department that’s serving your competitor.
6. Consistency through smaller agencies. Make sure that the agency representative you deal with is also responsible for the distribution of your campaign, thus giving them a direct handle on both sides of the transaction.  Smaller ad agencies tend to allow for this, are often hungrier and can provide better attention and service.
7. Target niche sites and bloggers. Make sure the ad agency you select has access to a network of various traffic sources including social media, search engines, niche sites and bloggers -as they can be valuable sources of traffic.
8. Avoid extra costs of hiring a dedicated affiliate/program manager, and instead, appoint the ad agency as the exclusive program manager or agency of record to promote your campaign.
9. Monitor your success. Make sure the agency you choose provides advertiser and publisher reporting interfaces so that you can login and see real time ad tracking data like the number of leads generated, ads run and sites reached.
10. Make improvements as you go. Select an ad agency that can differentiate between sources of traffic so advertisers and publishers can optimize campaigns, fuel profitable sources and avoid wasting ad time and money on the wrong sites.

Are there any additional tips that you’d like to add to Neil’s list? What about tips for off-line or traditional advertising?

During an economic downturn, there are three kinds of companies: 1) Those that go under, 2) Those that scrape by, and 3) Those that prosper.

If you’re a marketing director, advertising director or sales director and your company is in reasonably good financial shape, there are three things you can do to prosper during this economic downturn.

1) Cut your travel, trade show and sponsorship budgets as close to zero as you can. Trade shows and sponsorships are the extra programs you run when you’ve got the fundamentals (retail and brand marketing) covered. (Come to think of it, you may even consider cutting your branding budget, too, and focusing on supercharging your retail and point-of-purchase programs.)

2) Reallocate your budget into the hard-working programs that are easily measured. These would include paid search, direct mail, direct response television, email marketing and a whole slew of new and emerging media that are highly-measurable.

3) Use your reallocated budget to grab as much market share as you possibly can. Remember those companies that were going to go under and the ones that were going to barely scrape by? By executing points #1 and #2, you can chip away at their market share. This is done by aggressively targeting their customer base with discount programs, premiums and special offers in exchange for long-term contracts.

There’s a pretty good chance your competitors are cutting their advertising and marketing budgets right now. If you aggressively target their customers and approach those prospects with special offers and discounts, you can win those customers over and increase your market share.

To recap, there are three kinds of companies: Those that will die, those that will scrape by and those that will prosper. By re-allocating your budget, you can focus on hard-hitting and highly-measurable programs that can help you chip away at your competitor’s market share.

It’s a tough world out there. Wouldn’t it be great if there were no such thing as economic down-turns? Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Because of that, you should use this cycle as an opportunity to grow your business by targeting your competitor’s customer base.