Customer Preferences in Online Advertising-Part 2 of 3Written by Karon Thackston
In part one of this series, we discussed fact that studies show information leads over entertainment. We discovered that Web site visitors are primarily looking for information, and therefore, ads should be more information-oriented. The second of three discoveries in Jupiter Communications (www.jup.com) survey that I will comment on is discovery that some online advertising is seen as an extreme annoyance. Let's be sure your ads aren't included in that group. What They Hate No one likes to be bombarded with advertising. We all see it everywhere we go. It's on television, radio, billboards, and even grocery story carts for goodness sake. However, online advertising is viewed as most aggressive. Jupiter found that 49% of those surveyed said online advertising was most intrusive of all. Many were willing to tolerate ads in broadcast or print media, probably due to fact that they could leave room, change station or turn page. However, online ads hold an extremely negative reputation. From my experience, this is most likely due to fact that online ads often have a "used car dealer" air to them. I have seen many that look like they're all produced from same template. These ads promise sun, moon and stars. They scream about why you simply must buy product or service. Then, to make it worse, site captures your email address and you receive hundreds of email advertisements via an autoresponder that apparently has no end. The Worst Possible Ads The worst offender is pop-up ads. These are advertisements that pop onto screen as you click through a Web site. They advertise specials or offer subscriptions to Ezines, etc. Once thought to be a tremendous sales tool, these ads have become increasingly offensive.
| | Use Comparisons To Make Your Point: It Works Like a Charm!Written by Ron Sathoff
One of first lessons I ever learned about advertising was that you have to get your point across quickly, before your audience loses interest. There's a big problem with this, though: many sales messages are too complex to get across in just a few seconds or paragraphs. This is especially true when it comes to selling new technologies or sophisticated business opportunities -- two "biggies" in Internet business.So what can you do? On one hand, you want to make your message short and easy to understand, but on other hand, you don't want to over-simplify your sales pitch. This can be quite a puzzler. The best tool I've found for making my point when it comes to explaining complex ideas is to use a comparison. If you try to explain a new concept from scratch, you're never going to be able to keep audience's attention. With a good comparison, however, you are not starting from scratch -- rather, you are using your audience's prior knowledge about something else to make a statement about your product or service. In essence, you are just taking what your customers know already, and then "tweaking" it a little bit to help make your point. There are at least two ways that you can use comparisons in your persuasive messages: 1) Comparison and Contrast: This is probably most common form of comparison. You simply use people's knowledge of some product and service and then show how yours is different and better. This allows you to focus your valuable "message time" on benefits and advantages of your offer. For instance, if you were trying to market a new software program, you could say, "Our program works just like a word processor, but allows you to edit, modify, and upload web pages as well. It's power of an HTML editor with ease of a word processor!" By phrasing it this way, you can do a lot of explanation in just a few words. You are also doing one thing that we all desire -- you are distinguishing yourself from your competitors. 2) Analogy: Analogies are also very good for explaining complex subjects. In an analogy, you help people understand your idea by showing how it is similar to something else. This, of course, will only work if you use something that audience is already familiar with -- if you don't, you're only doubling their confusion!
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