What Is Advertising? - A Primer For Beginners

Advertising has changed a lot over the years. What was once an effective way to help raise awareness of products and services has now transformed into a complex network of various advertising styles, tools, and channels. Advertisers spend millions of dollars on advertising every year, so it’s likely that you are at least somewhat familiar with what it is and how it works in practice. However, if you want to really understand how advertising works from an insider's perspective and see how companies use all the tools in their arsenal in order to make money from your ad budget, this article is for you.

The most important question involved in business is, "How do we make money?" If you can answer that question effectively, you will be able to understand everything about advertising. This article is designed to provide a very brief explanation of how the things that go into advertising actually work. Trying to explain all of it on a webpage would require an entire book, so I have simplified things greatly below. As always, feel free to ask any questions before reading or reviewing the article.

If you are thinking of writing an advertising textbook or training manual, this article is not for you. You will know when you are finished reading this article whether or not it was what you were looking for. If not, feel free to ask questions and I will try to answer them for you as best I can.

The first thing that advertisers need to understand is the difference between the two main groups that people fall into: A group that has money but doesn't know what services or products they should buy (the market) and a group that has products or services they want to sell but doesn't know who to sell them to (the advertisers). Here is what the two parties have to do in order to help each other out:

When an advertiser approaches a market, they are usually trying to do one of four things:

The first three are collectively known as “Direct Response Advertising.” Notice that this is the kind of advertising we have been providing and teaching on this site for more than 15 years now. It is also the most effective kind of advertising an advertiser can use when put into a combination with other kinds of advertising like “Image Advertising” and “Salesmanship Advertising.”

The fourth thing that advertisers try to do is called “Image Advertising.” It is designed to help the advertiser sell their products to someone other than the market. In order to understand why this is usually a very bad idea, let’s first look at how advertising helps the market without it:

Here we see that direct response advertising works very well in helping to drive awareness and sales of products and services. By starting with awareness (of which advertising is a significant contributor) and then building on it by using advertising, customers go from not knowing about a particular product or service to realizing their need for it. This is “the Deming Way” at its best in business.

In the second example above, we see what happens when an advertiser uses Image Advertising without helping to drive awareness first. Because this kind of advertising is based very much on image and celebrity, it can be very attractive to some advertisers. However, because it does not help to provide the market with the information they need in order to understand their problems and what solutions might help them, it can be extremely ineffective. This is why most direct response advertisers avoid using this type of advertising altogether. Here’s why:

The combinations of ads shown above are both just examples of how something that causes more harm than good for the market can often still be a successful source of revenue for advertisers if they target the right market. For example, advertising for a legitimate weight loss program will not be effective for those who are already fully aware of what the product does and why it would be beneficial to them. This is why you will always see the same companies advertising weight loss programs on television. There is always room for new market entries in this market due to constant turnover and because some people are always looking for newer and better products that they have not yet tried. If your advertisement did not help people understand their problem, they either don't buy or they take longer to buy later on. Either way, it hurts your business in the long run.

If your advertising is not effective, it hurts you in two ways:

First, when your sales are low, you suffer a loss of revenue. This is a fact of life that all advertisers have to face at some point. No advertising is perfect and as a result, there will always be some kind of negative impact on sales if it is poorly designed and executed. If the problems are easy enough to fix (for example, if yours was poorly designed), then fixing them will help immensely in the long run but most situations are not so simple.

Second, if your sales are low, you cannot afford to lower your price because you can't make up for the lost revenue from not selling enough. This is quite common with many businesses. All too often, the mistake that is made is to assume that if you increase the number of advertisements, then you will have to have fewer salespeople do a larger volume of sales. This is rarely true and any good advertising expert will tell you that in order to increase your sales by 50%, you would actually need to double the amount of salespeople and make them work twice as hard.

This kind of thinking has worked very well for tens of millions of people over the years and it can work for your business as well if you are willing to put forth the necessary effort. The method that has worked well in the past remains a good way to go today and it will continue to work well for you in the future if you are willing to invest in it. If you're not willing, your business will suffer and it won't make much of a difference who else is making the same mistake.

In the above section, we saw what happens when you don't have an advertising campaign- you can still sell successfully but not at an optimal level. You will be able to earn revenue but not enough and costs are likely to be too high as well due to excessive overhead (especially overheads like salespeople). If your advertising is not helping people to understand their problems and what service or product you offer can help them solve those problems, it is a mistake that will keep costing you money unless you fix it.

This section examines how well an advertising campaign works for the advertiser as well as for the market. Here's how it works for both parties involved:

The first example shows what happens when an advertiser invests in Image Advertising without a plan in place to drive awareness of their products and services first. This cost the advertiser sales while they were only trying to get repeat customers and attract new ones.

Conclusion

To summarize, the best way to advertise is through direct response marketing.[/vc_column_text]If you truly want to become an expert in advertising and learn how to get better results and a higher return on your investment, than you should take Dan Kennedy's class "The $50 Billion Dollar Secret" course. It will go over the same information that I have talked about here but will additionally show you how to apply it in your industry. In addition, that course will also teach you how to use your advertising as a business builder or service based business cash flow machine so that can come out ahead of most of your competition using this proven method.