Week 11 Advertising

You can follow the design acronym that a good ad is well C.R.A.P.H.T.E.D.

C. Make sure the design has a clear driving concept, that it’s obvious what you’re trying to accomplish.  Also incorporate contrasting colors and fonts to emphasize the most important things in the ad. 

R. Make sure there is some consistency between your ad campaign and your product marketing on your social media sites and your web site, otherwise people may wonder if they were taken to the wrong place.

A. Align the content of the ad in a way that makes sense and is not too crowded.

P. Group content and images appropriately in the ad.

H. Make sure that the item that’s most important stands out the most.

T. Use a font that’s easy to read on a computer and make your headline stand out.

E. Make it easy for people to understand how to get more content or purchase your services from the ad.  Don’t stray so far from regular ad format that they are confused.

D. Don’t get too incredibly detailed.  Keep the depth of content appropriate to the format.

Foursquare/Facebook Places – This could be a cool tool if we can develop a physical space that sounds interesting.  Like the “green brewing eco-sustainability lab,” or something like that.  People who came to our office could check in that they are there, which would both spread the word about our company and give them a chance to show their followers that they are thinking about sustainability.

Banner Ads – We could do banner ads on the side of the page on Facebook.  We’d need to target them to a very small and specific group of people since our service is very limited in audience, but it is so specific that targeting might not be that difficult.  That’s especially true if we limited it by location and title.

The format of advertising within a blog post will work for us.  Our blog posts can easily tag a line on somewhere saying something like, “if you want to incorporate eco-friendly ideas into your brewery systems, shoot us an email or visit or sustainability lab.”

I also really like the option to let people promote our posts. That seems like it could work really well for our service and our audience.

Twitter advertising may be useful.  I’d want to try that out and see what kind of impact it has before investing too much in it.  Linked In I might skip at first, just because I don’t feel like those ads are as powerful.  Once I get facebook ads down, I’d look at Linked In ads as something to test out at that point.

I’d want to start out having an ad every month and see what that gets me. My feeling there is that I don’t want to be annoying to people by hounding them, but I also don’t think it would be too expensive so we could afford to do it fairly often.  I think it would also really depend on the capacity.  With blogs newsletters and all the other social media, we’d need to make sure all the work was balanced.  I think more organic posts can be more effective than the ads, so I’d want to focus more there and add in ads rather than prioritize ads.  I’d test out the $10 daily pay per click thing and see how often I actually spent that money to figure out my next move.

I think the ads below would be effective because they are targeted to a very specific audience.  They are vibrant, and they get our message across quickly.  I would want to see what one looks like put together, and then make edits though.  It’s a little hard to picture it without actually going all the way through to posting.