Your business isn’t going to get very far with advertising – but it’s also easy to go to the opposite extreme and end up with an aggressive advertising strategy that simply turns people off and leaves you in a worse position than if you had not bothered at all!
All you want to accomplish with advertising is to make the public aware of who you are, what you offer, and why that is good for them. There are many effective ways to do this – but there are also some downright awful ways to go about your business.
You’ll sometimes here this referred to as “bold advertising”, and these ads are typically super pushy. You’ve likely seen them: bright colors, huge letters, attention seeking and more than willing to pop up everywhere and anywhere.
As you also know, this gets old, annoying and prone to complete ignorance after a while. Not exactly what you want associated with your brand, is it? I can also include pop unders, audio ads, multiple videos, huge ads, ads that won’t go away, ads that cover the main content, or simply plastered all over a page. Nobody likes them, and they’re ineffectual.
The same goes for spam – and if you’re sending email after email with nothing but promotions, I have news for you: that’s spam. The key rule of thumb here is to ask yourself what would annoy you – and find the most conservative level of annoyance.
Once you’ve found that, make it even more conservative. That’s likely to be a bearable level for all. You may feel like it’s not enough – but at least you won’t be annoying people who see your ads. In fact, they may even click instead…