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Here is an eye opener on magazine advertising offering you valuable information on the various aspects and types of magazine advertising with useful tips on how to make your magazine ad powerful and effective.
When is magazine advertising appropriate?
- Since Magazine advertising space costs significantly more than newspaper advertising space, they are not ideal for most small, local businesses.
- You really need to have a good reason to justify this expenditure such as
- A business that is upscale
- A classy restaurant with a menu that puts mom to shame and caters to a trendy crowd, in order to show off a four-color photo of diners feasting on a sumptuous meal in their chic establishment.
- An upscale women’s boutique, in order to show off to full effect the one-of-a-kind fashionable apparel they sell etc
- Consider how closely a local magazine parallels with your core market . Most local businesses find their trade in their home or immediately adjacent towns while many local magazines are distributed over a wide region—say, from fifty to one hundred towns. Therefore you must carefully calculate what, if any, return you will get from advertising to a geographic base that is much broader than your typical trade reaches, in order to decide whether magazine advertising is appropriate for your business.
Features of advertising in various types of magazines
- Specialty magazines
- Lowest cost per thousand qualified prospects - Though the cost per thousand readers may be high for specialty magazines, they may offer the lowest cost per thousand qualified prospects. This is because readers of a specialty magazine are more potential purchasers of your applicable specialized product or service than those of a general readership publication.
- Smaller ads work better - Since Specialty magazines tend to be thoroughly read and not scanned, smaller ads often work well in these vehicles.
- Good results for Mail-order products - Mail-order products, especially in fields where products are not readily available at the retail level, tend to net good results from specialty magazine advertising.
A useful tip
Here is a much less expensive, sometimes even free, advertising alternative.
- Find a mail-order company that is willing to purchase your product at a discounted rate and feature it in its catalog. While some of these outfits don’t charge you for the space in their catalogs, some do. Often, those catalog companies that do charge for “ad” space will allow you to pay for this space with free product at the wholesaler price instead of with cash.
- Trade magazines
- Trade magazines allow you to zero in on your target audience.
- Trade magazines tend to have smaller circulations and even lower advertising rates than specialty magazines.
Some useful tips
- Run full-page ads in trade publications - Do this even if it means you need to reduce your ad frequency to meet your advertising budget and can only afford one full-page ad per year.
Readers of trade magazines don’t usually bother checking less than full-page ads even if they get caught up in carefully reading the editorial content, as they know that only small start-up companies tend to buy small ad space. They are therefore not interested in any risks involved in purchasing from a less than well-established firm. This is why some companies even purchase double truck, or facing full pages, multiple page, cover gatefolds, or special insert ads that they have printed themselves in order to really impress the publication’s readers with their image and reputation.
Tips for advertising in magazines
- Create Quality advertisements by
- Making ads that are slicker and more attractive than newspaper ads
- Making the copy to read just as cleverly as a radio spot
- Making the ads visually appealing.
- Judging your ads before finalisation
- Develop more than one ad design idea or concept.
- Place mock-ups of these ad concepts in an old copy of the magazine you plan to advertise in.
- Compare as you flip through the publication to see which one really captures your attention
- Gather the opinions of other people
- Be leery of “bingo card” responses – This means you mustmeasure sales generated by your magazine ads and not inquiries.
Many new magazine advertisers are impressed when they get hundreds or even thousands of inquiries from magazine readers who have circled the company’s name on readers’ service cards. While you should follow up on these inquiries, very few of these inquiries add up to sales. Readers often circle dozens of names on readers’ service cards even when they actually have very little interest in the products
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