This one has just come out from the ANZ bank to promote their small business services and it certainly does put a smile on your face. It’s an old strategy that is more appropriate today than ever. Enjoy – I did.

The following presentation shows some very clever print advertisements at work. I love this kind of smart advertising and it shows that good ideas are not about spending a lot of money, instead it is more about being creative and perhaps putting a smile on the face of potential customers. Enjoy.

A lot of advertising sends a very confusing message to potential customers. Advertising needs to be planned and it needs to be simple.

Make some time to sit and think about the exact message that you are trying to pass on to potential customers. Give them a reason to pick up the telephone or to visit your business. Often advertising becomes cluttered and confusing because there is simply too much information in the advertisement. If you can’t summarise what you want your advertising message to say in one short sentence, go back to the drawing board until you can.

Once this magic sentence has been determined build your advertisement to portray this message clearly. Your advertising will have far greater results if you repeat this message rather than try to introduce lots of other startling facts and figures.

If you take a few minutes to flick through today’s newspaper have a look at the advertisements that really stand out and catch your eye. They are generally the least cluttered, they will have a clear message, they may promote a lot of products but there is no doubt about what they are selling and what the message is that they are trying to get across.

For advertising to work for any business, deciding what the specific message is that you want to pass to potential customers is critical and it is the best place to start. The more thought you put into answering this question the more effective your advertising will be.

This is a question that I get asked all of the time normally from people who are skeptical about the benefits of advertising. I have to say unequivocally that yes, advertising does work, but it is not an exact science and more often than not, it is a matter of trial and error.

Now I know that this does not inspire a lot of confidence in the advertising process however, like all forms of marketing, the more information you have and the more time and energy that you put into your advertising, that is researching it, thinking about what you are going to advertise and so on, the greater the results will be.

From my own experience I see a lot of businesses dabble in the field of advertising. After running one advertisement in a newspaper that doesn’t produce the expected results they make sweeping statements like “newspaper advertising doesn’t work”. Of course, newspaper advertising does work but it depends on a number of factors. For example what is the advertisement like (as in is it really busy and cluttered or does it sell on simple and clear message), where is it placed in the newspaper, what is the product or service being advertised and what are the other outside influences that could affect the results?

More often than not, businesses don’t really have good monitoring systems in place to determine where new customers are coming from, making it virtually impossible to determine if advertising has worked or not.

Another common problem with advertising is that many business owners have unrealistic expectations on the return from their advertising. For a couple of hundred dollars they expect the advertising to return tens of thousands of dollars. This just doesn’t happen. If it was that easy every small business owner would be a multi millionaire.

I have been involved a lot of businesses that have started their advertising with some trepidation. I have watched them slowly build their businesses with smart and effective advertising to the point where they have grown into large corporations that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on advertising. 

So in answering the question posed, does advertising really work, the answer is yes it most certainly does, but the key’s are how you advertise, where you advertise and what you say in your advertising.

I will be spending the next few weeks looking at various forms of advertising and what you can do to increase your chances of making advertising work for you.  

Looking through these photographs it is easy to see just how powerful images can be. This should be proof enough of the value of having high quality photographs in any promotional material or advertising that you use for you business.

There are plenty of great sources of photographic images – either contact your local photographer (many have excellent stock shots) or do an online search and you will find plenty of places to buy images. I always suggest to my clients that their investment in quality images for their promotional material and advertising will always pay off.

Enjoy these incredible photographs.