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Starting Smart: Three Keys to Using Print Advertising in New Market and New Product Launches

by Eric Gagnon

Last week we covered some of the key aspects of starting a print advertising program for your new market launch, discussing the risks of print advertising, reasons why  it makes sense to run smaller, fractional ad sizes instead of full page ads, and the importance of providing something of value to readers so they they’ll respond to your advertising.

This week we’ll talk about the importance of dialling in your sales copy before you advertise, advertising frequency, and what to do when ads stop pulling.

Here are the three more keys to starting smart with your print advertising program . . .

1.) Run print advertising only after you are confident you are using the right messaging and promotional offer, by using other marketing methods first

There are many companies, especially those launching in new markets, who’ve been burned by spending too much on running print advertising programs that are too big and too expensive for the response they generate, using layout and copy based on someone’s untested creative idea, or some other best guess at what sells the company’s product.

Starting smart with a print advertising program means mitigating your risk by running your print ad program only after you’ve gotten a handle on the benefits and the “call to action” promotional offer that works for your new market. And you can do this better, faster, and cheaper first by running a direct mail program, attending a trade show, and testing paid Internet search to develop, test, and change your marketing presentation as needed before you run any print advertising.

Pre-testing sales copy: Wouldn’t you rather place a print ad using selling content that worked well in another venue, instead of guessing at what might work, or running with some kind of “creative” concept that someone thinks will work?

Test mailings, and even tests of copy using various text ads on Google AdWords, are excellent ways to test which of several different sales copy approaches work best to generate sales response for your product. There isn’t any reason why a great Adwords text headline, or effective headline copy in a direct mail flyer can’t be recycled to make it just as effective when used in a print ad.

You can also use direct mail to test sales copy approaches, pricing, promotion, and any other major unknown in a new market launch, using a series of small, inexpensive mailings to test each of these variables (we covered direct mail testing extensively in a previous Tuesday Marketing Notes series, and you can access these articles from the links at the end of this article).

The downside of pre-testing and scaling your marketing program without print advertising is you make a smaller splash initially, but the upside is your ads have a much higher likelihood of generating sales response because you are much closer to knowing what sells your product in your new market.

2.) Run more than one insertion, but if your first insertion doesn’t pull, then don’t be surprised if your second and third insertions don’t do any better

We’ve all been told that it takes more than one insertion for print advertising to build awareness, and this is true as far as it goes. It does take more than one insertion of a good ad to build interest and response. Generally, when planning a print advertising program you should budget for the ad space size that allows you to run three consequtive insertions in a publication, to give a good ad a chance to build response over this time.

Due to their busy schedules or lack of attention, some readers won’t respond to your ad the first time it appears, but may do so the next time they see your ad, and even readers who see your ad a second time and take no action might be moved closer to contacting your company in the future. A reader who develops a need to buy your product months from now might remember seeing your ad months before, and may look for your company again in the current issue of the publication.

Brand exposure may be a good reason for running a consistent, long-term advertising program, but if your ads aren’t pulling the response you’d hoped for, and if you can't measure the response of your ads, does this justify the expense of staying in?

What happens when you run an advertising schedule and you get little or no response when the ad appears in the first issue? Should you continue to let the ads run in the expectation that awareness will build, and that ads appearing in the second and subsequent issues will pull better response? You might get better response from the second insertion, but if your first insertion doesn't pull well enough to meet even the lowest end of your expectations, the second one usually isn’t going to do that much better.

I think this “awareness building” aspect of advertising has been oversold, especially for new market launches, where you are developing the most effective ways to present and sell your product, and must be ready to adapt if necessary by changing your messaging and your marketing plan. If you aren’t generating response from the first insertion of your ad, you probably aren’t going to get any more from the next insertion, which means your ad isn’t pulling enough sales response.

What constitutes solid sales response from a first insertion? This depends on your product price, your sales process, and all the other factors which are unique to your company and its marketing program. Set some benchmarks that define your expectations for your desired sales response from your ads, and stick to them. These projections can be based on your current experience with sales response on ads in your established markets or, if you have no such experience, set a minimum level of response you’d accept to continue running these ads.

However you do this, it’s important to set some goals ahead of time,  stick to them, and follow the next rule, which is:

3.) If or when your ads stop working, stop running them

Because they’re expensive and they have such long lead times, print advertising schedules are the runaway trains of your marketing program. When ads don’t generate enough sales response from the first insertion, it’s always better to stop advertising right away, or make a significant change to your ad deliverable or schedule, instead of hoping that the next insertions of the same ad will pull better than the first, which hardly ever happens. Waiting two months to see if your ads will draw better response never works; it just burns more money.

In the other extreme, you might be getting good response to your ads in the first few issues, and then response suddenly drops: Your market or competitive environment changes, or sometimes your marketing program works so well you’ve drawn the most easily available prospects from a publication.

Once you’ve drawn the ready buyers, your incremental cost to draw more prospects goes up the steep side of the hockey stick. Then, before you know it, at several thousand dollars a pop (or more) in a couple of short months of plummeting sales response there’s nothing but a big smoking hole where several thousand dollars of your company’s (or client’s) money used to be.

This problem can usually be avoided by vigilantly monitoring the sales response you’re receiving from each and every ad placement, developing “response curves” to project total response based on the first several days’ worth of returns (see TMN 37 at this link), and terminating ads and publications whose response falls below your minimum expectations, as previously described. And by “terminating,” I mean being ruthless and adamant about cutting your ad program, regardless of how much the publication’s ad space reps plead with you to stay in.

It’s always important to err on the side of being too quick to pull out of a publication, because being too slow costs a lot more money, and there’s not much downside to stopping an advertising program early, since waiting a month or two costs money that you could be putting toward more productive marketing activities.

Once you pull out, you can always retool your advertising program by changing your sales copy and positioning in your layouts to present more effective sales benefits, such as the ones you may discover by debriefing your company’s sales reps. You can also develop a better or more targeted informational premium or promotional offer that is closer to the needs of your market. You can drop down to a smaller ad size, change your frequency, or run in different publications.

Just about anything you do differently with your advertising program is better than sticking with one that doesn’t work, and improves your chances for eventual success, but the first step is stopping an ad program that’s not working.

Despite its risks and drawbacks, print advertising can be a very productive part of your marketing program, and if you start smart by being conservative, starting small and carefully monitoring your ad programs, you’ll turn print advertising decisions from a risky crapshoot into an investment in greater sales response for your marketing program.

More Market Testing Resources

Here are some additional links from previous issues of Tuesday Marketing Notes you may find useful for pre-testing your print advertising projects for new market launches:

Start-Ups and New Product Launches (PART 2: More Reality and Market Testing)

Sales Turnarounds: What to Do When Your Marketing Program Hits the Wall

B2B Print Advertising (Part 5: B2B  Ad Frequency: How to Look Like a Big-Time Advertiser on a Small Ad Budget )

Next week, we’ll cover copy, layout, and promotional techniques for making small print ads pull as well or better than big ads . . .

 

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.