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Customer Engagement & Retention

Creative Advertising, Are You Doing It?

I talk to clients all the time about internet marketing, search engine optimization, and a variety other things to help them see results with their online businesses. However, when it comes right down to it, it’s all about making sales. Whether you go out and cold call, talk to friends and family, rely on SEO and SMO strategies, or just generate sales over time, the sale has to be made.

Promotions and creative ads can really help you increase sales. I had a client recently who did a “Free Product Promotion” and saw amazing results. Remember, there are two main things I want to happen with a promotion:

  1. Make a sale! Obviously this is the best thing because hopefully, by making a sale, you’ll also make money – duh.
  2. Get information from the client. Getting names, emails, and contact information of any sort can be almost as good as making the sale. Generally if a visitor does something on your site like give you information, it means they are somewhat interested in what you are offering. Generating leads is actually a business some people focus on. By getting good leads, you can remind them about your business over and over again and eventually they could turn in to a big revenue for your company.

The story below is a perfect example of how this works. It’s also a good example of a well-written press release.

Free Health Drinks Attract Thousands of New Customers to BestHealthFoodStore.net

BestHealthFoodStore.net was offering free health drink samples until they were overwhelmed by thousands of requests from thirsty customers. Daily traffic was steady at about twenty-five visitors a day when store operators suddenly tracked over 2,000 visitors in less than 24 hours.

As the mad dash continued, operators of www.BestHealthFoodStore.net grew uneasy about the costs associated with the promotion. Jane Wakefield, a store owner, said, “We couldn’t believe our eyes as the requests poured in, from one every five minutes, to two or three per minute”. They were forced to discontinue the free health drink promotion.

Smith and Wakefield posted a note on www.BestHealthFoodStore.net mentioning their surprise at the thousands of people who wanted free health drinks. They encouraged visitors to look around the store, use a special code and receive 20% off any purchase. They also offered free health podcasts and articles.

Obviously, this is powerful advertising for a new Internet health food store, but can they afford to send free health drink samples to so many people and stay in business? How many of those people will ever buy anything from BestHealthFoodStore.net? Wakefield answers this question by saying, “It is encouraging that many of the requests reveal a genuine desire for higher quality health products than what is being sold in stores or advertised on TV”. Whether or not there will be enough buyers to keep them in business remains to be seen. For now, though, www.BestHealthFoodStore.net offers all natural, low carb, high fiber foods and health drinks not found at the retail level.

So, as you can see, by doing a creative advertising strategy, this new website business got so much attention they weren’t really sure how to handle it. The important thing is, they’ve learned how effective a creative ad can be to get traffic and build a database to market to now and in the future. I’ve encouraged them to learn from this and make it even more profitable next time. Recording the details of the campaign and then not repeating the mistakes (or repeating the things that really worked) are key to the success of any business.

Now, how are YOU going to implement these ideas with your business plan?

3 replies on “Creative Advertising, Are You Doing It?”

Your encouragement in helping each of your students to be successful is so valuable. We need to stop over thinking each task and just do it! The above example of a press release is a great example of how simple we can make our own press release. Thanks, Nate

Yes great article Nate. It really goes to show how easy it easy it is to promote your site by using press releases and creative strategy when advertising your online business website.

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