We often get asked if we provide web design, and the answer is always absolutely! Though we established our reputation in print advertising design, many clients are not aware that we have been providing small to mid-sized businesses and organizations with professional web design services for over 10 years now (In fact, we designed and developed AdMedic.com).

AdMedic offers a total web solution that includes custom design, hosting, content management, traffic building, tracking, support and more – all for one great price. And providing you more than just a great website, but a complete web presence. For more information about our affordable web design services, please contact us today.

Before: 4-Color Magazine Print Ad

One request we increasingly get from clients is adapting their print advertising design so it can then be used for their online marketing as well.

One of the key differences is that print ads generally provide all the information in the ad, and ask you to take an action (at least a good print ad will!).  On the other hand, banner advertising serves more to grab the reader’s attention, and get them to click to a website or a landing page which will then serve as the means to generate the online action (call us, fill out a form, etc).

So can display advertising be the starting point for a good banner ad or campaign? Absolutely. But you need to remember a few things while you’re at it.

For one, keep it short! Think of a banner ad as a billboard. You need to distill your print ad to the most important points. And try to cut the copy as much as you can — just leaving the key motivators that will encourage your prospect to click through to your website.After all there is usually less space on a banner, and the resolution is lower on the web, meaning you can’t make the font size too small or it won’t be legible anyway.

A recent example is a print ad we did for a client (pictured here) – when he then wanted converted into a 300×250 banner ad for the print publications website (It’s very common these days for trade publications and other pubs to offer banner ads as part of the print buy, or for a nominal extra charge).

After: 300x250 Banner Ad Design

In this example we had to cut out quite a bit of copy, resize the ad from a vertical format to a horizontal format, and then add a button to encourage click-throughs.

In then end, the client was able to leverage their existing print advertising design to work with their online marketing effort – saving time and effort, and creating a more uniform “campaign” look across both mediums.

If you would like more information on how you can better integrate your online and offline advertising, contact us today.

1. Your concept focusing too heavily on your product’s features instead of the benefits you offer potential buyers. People will respond because of the benefits out of your product, such as convenience, wealth, happiness, safety, intelligence, entertainment, etc. Customers are less responsive to features you put into your product, such as size, weight, durability, company experience, friendliness, etc.
2. Your concept uses too many different type fonts and design “doo dads.” Uncluttered, seamless advertising allows people to get to the main point faster.
3. Your concept attempts to present too many benefits or ideas at one time. Good marketing focuses on the single most compelling reason customers should stop and read and respond to your offer over what competitors offer. This focused benefit should be front and center in your advertising. All other benefits and product features should be secondary to the main message.
4. Your concept relies on “borrowed interest” to present your message. The visual image or metaphor you are featuring in your ad design is too far removed from your actual product. Introducing unrelated ideas only confuses potential customers.
5. Your concept relies on too much copy. Sometimes less is more. Too much copy crammed into a limited space makes the reader work too hard and they will move on. Try to focus on they main benefit you offer and limit the supportive copy to “proving” you can deliver on the promised benefit.
6. Your concept will not reproduce well in publications
7. Your company logo is too prominently featured. People are more interested in promises of what you can do for them than your company name. Reducing the size of your logo will give you more space to sell without sacrificing response.
8. Your concept lacks an incentive to respond, or a means to respond. Your concept should guide the potential customer to take the next step, whether that is to log onto your website, call a number, show up at an event, bring a coupon to a store, or accept an incentive to act.
9. Your concept does not clearly explain your product or service. Curiosity killed the cat and it can kill off potential customer interest too. Don’t make people work too hard to understand your message.
10. The tone of your ad design concept is inappropriate for the type of benefit you offer. Think of your product or service as a person. What’s the personality trait? Intelligent, quiet, fast, strong, sexy, sympathetic? The words and images you use in your ad concept should match the personality of your product or service.

So you are about to invest a boatload of dollars to run your print ads. And there’s this question that’s been bugging you: is this going to work?

Marketers have asked this question for years, but measuring print ad effectiveness can be very difficult. While it’s tempting to wait and see the impact of your ads on sales, a lot of factors come into play before a sale happens, and it usually takes a long time to see sales results from ads.

That means you can waste a lot of money on an ineffective ad before you even realize what’s going on. So it’s imperative that you quickly discover the effectiveness of your print ad.

There are two ways to measure ad effectiveness. The expensive way, and the creative way.

To find out which one is right for you, read on.

The traditional solution lies in hiring a market research company to conduct pre-advertising and post-advertising measurements. If you are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in your advertising campaign, a market research firm is the way to go. They may help you prevent very costly mistakes before it’s too late.

Even after just the first month or two of advertising, a researcher can jump in and compare factors awareness, preference, and perception of your brand, before and after your ads run.

Or, even without the benefit of running your ads, researchers can simply pretest your ad concepts and measure the likely effect that your ad message will have on typical customers. “Soft” factors that can be pre-measured include, interest, relevance, likeability, believability, uniqueness, news worthiness.

But what if you are a smaller advertiser who cannot justify the cost of research?

Can you still measure the effect of your ad without waiting for sales reports? The answer is yes, if you are prepared to get a little creative with the information you include in your ads.

One creative approach is to add a response element to your ad—give prospective customers a secondary reason to respond, even if they are not ready to buy immediately.

For example, if you have a brochure for a complicated or expensive product or service, offer to mail it to prospects free. The response your offer generates, while not yet sales, is a faster, cheaper way to measure whether your ad is attracting notice.

Other types of creative offers you might consider including in your ad are: free 30-day initial trial… contest entry… free how-to guide… free evaluation… free consultation… free analysis.

Besides giving your ad readers a reason to respond, the second approach you can take is to carefully control how they respond.

For instance, if your offering that free brochure, perhaps you’ve included a phone number in your ad. If you can dedicate a special phone number tied to the brochure offer in your print ads, it’s easy to track the number of calls your ad is generating. If not a special phone number, simply provide callers with a special extension number to ask for—even a fictitious extension—so when someone mentions the extension, you are always measuring ad response.

Even more savvy is creating multiple ‘extension numbers,’ each representing a different ad message variation or a different publication. By tracking response down to the individual ad or individual publication you can make subtle changes to your advertising ‘on the fly’ as you learn what message/publication combination generates the most interest.

An alternative to the phone extension method is the creation of a special “offer code” that callers must specify when requesting your bonus offer. Again, different codes will indicate which ad or the publication the caller is responding to.

If you have a website, it can be easier still to set up special “splash pages” on your site and only known by your ad readers. As you see visitors accumulating on this unique greeting page, you are measuring ad response.

So, with just a little ad creativity — adding special offers and with special coding — the small advertiser can buy intelligence a lot more cheaply than the cost of market research.

Ad agencies talk about two kinds of ads: Direct Response versus Image, or “Brand” advertising. What’s the difference, and which one is right for you?

Brand vs. Direct Response

For any company, a ‘brand’ consists of all the visual, emotional, rational, and cultural images people associate with your product. The goal of image advertising is essentially to create a compelling association in people’s minds between product and image. Nike wants you to think of soaring, scoring, winning when you see their swoosh.

Once you’ve made that connection between your brand and its imagery, you hope the connection will lead to a loyal army of customers. With a strong brand you are able to sell more and sell it at a higher price.

If you are a CFO of a large company, you will have even put a dollar figure on your company’s “brand equity.” The strength of a brand name, like Coke, and its “refreshing” imagery can actually be measured in dollars and can be counted as part of the overall value of your company if it is ever sold.

As you can imagine, it’s expensive to build and maintain brand identity. You can blitz the market with a month’s worth of ads, and this blitz can create a favorable buzz. But once you stop advertising, the impression is fleeting and the impact falls off quickly. Without money to support the brand, its equity falls.

Smaller companies often can’t afford to advertise constantly. They can’t afford to maintain brand equity. Also, companies who are marketing to other businesses — rather than to consumers (business-to-business marketers) — may not have adequate outlets for keeping their brand name constantly in front of their potential customers. So what do they do?

Direct Response Advertising

That’s where direct response ads can be effective. If an image ad makes people think, a direct response ad makes them act. Pick up the phone; fill out a reply slip; clip a coupon; visit your website.

As a small company, your advertising message can disappear from view for a small period of time, allowing you to economize your funds and “work your leads.”

As we describe this, you may be thinking about direct mail right now.

But direct response advertising is a broader concept that can take on many forms: post-cards, print ads, emails, radio spots, infomercials. Regardless of what form you adopt, the goal in each case is the same: generate a pool of prospective buyers (leads), or generate an order (sales), or generate site visits (traffic).

That’s a lot different from generating an image that will translate into loyalty.

Look at your existing ads. Beyond a phone number and address, have you provided an incentive to act? If so, you are running response advertising.

The key to response is incentive. If you cannot afford to advertise constantly, you need to find creative offers that will induce customers to act when you do run ads. Effective, limited-time offers might include:

• Reduced price
• Free trial
• Bonus gift or service
• Free information
• Buy one, get one free
• Free evaluation / consultation
• Free delivery
• Free analysis
• Free upgrade
• Extended Warranty

Again, the goal is to generate maximum response from each ad you run so that you have plenty of prospective customers to focus on while your advertising is dormant.

Pure direct response advertising is usually designed to sell an offer, such as those listed above. The ad will talk less about the product being sold, and more about the special incentive you need to take advantage of NOW.

But in practice, at Admedic, we often find it’s preferable to blend “image” and “response” in the same ad. We believe that you should strive for response, but at the same time you should always groom your image.

To see examples of how we have blended image and response for other businesses, view our samples or contact us online.

Here’s an interesting critique on the iPad. Since we don’t have one, I’ll have to take his word on it. But judging from Apple’s record, me thinks this will be a huge hit, and a great opportunity for advertisers. I never was a convert to the whole mobile phone advertising thing. I may still be wrong on that one, but let’s just say with iPad there seems to be hope for magazines, newspapers, and thus advertisers to finally transition to the digital world where they can actually make some money.

As far as if the ‘jury is out’ on the iPad, this is just page one of another blockbuster by Steve Jobs.

For years print has been the loser in a push-pull war against online advertising (OK so, maybe ‘pull-pull’). But the advent of the iPad may beckon the next chapter in this saga. This Boston Globe article highlights 2 Boston companies that are “looking to bridge their online, print, and broadcast branding on the iPad”.

The nice thing is that unlike E-mail, pay per click advertising, banners, twitter, or mobile – the iPad provides a more hospitable format for your advertising message. One can picture that quarter page newspaper ad on an iPad version of the NY Times – in all it’s display-ad splendor.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper advertising fell to levels not seen prior to 1985 (below $25 Billion). Of course, I imagine if any newspaper publisher had a time machine they would happily dial back to then.

The numbers themselves (28.6% drop  in print revenue from 2008) is not a shocker – give me 10 minutes and I’ll give you 20 more industries with those numbers.

What I did find eye surprising is the breakdown between print revenue and online. Newspaper print advertising revenue was a smidge under $25 billion, while the ‘savior’ of the industry was bumping along at $2.7 billion. Read this at your own risk.

They tried radio and print. That worked so well they are now getting into TV media. I never understood their choice to get into print and radio media. Sort of like Henry Ford wanting to diversify into the buggy whip industry. Maybe they will find more success with this. Read the story.

Your company’s professional image starts with a great logo. Here are a few samples of logos we have created for our clients.