Newspaper readership statistics help you determine if you can reach your target market through newspapers. This post provides 8 newspaper reader characteristics.

This post on advantages and disadvantages of advertising agencies was a request by a reader and commenter. So I’m writing this post for Shaz.

But I’ll do the same for you because I’m always pleased to get your questions and topic ideas. If you ever want me to cover a specific topic or answer a question in more detail than I can replying to your comment, please leave me a comment or send me an email.

So here’s my answer to Shaz about the advantages and disadvantages of advertising agencies.

I consider the major advantages and disadvantages of advertising agencies to be:

Advantages

• Specialized expertise,
• Team collaboration between experts,
• Time saving.

Disadvantages

• Cost,
• Lack of knowledge about your business,
• Agency/customer relationships.

Three Advantages Of Advertising Agencies

The advantages of advertising agencies base on expertise or time.

Specialized Expertise

As a business owner, your expertise is likely in your product or service area rather than in marketing, or some aspects of marketing like advertising. Plus there are so many aspects to marketing that no one person can be an expert in all of them.

You’ll find more advertising expertise in an advertising agency than in a marketing agency. So the first advantage of advertising agencies is the depth of expertise provided in advertising. A large advertising agency will have experts as account executives, researchers, media buyers, creatives, and more.

Smaller agencies frequently concentrate on one area of expertise. For example, some advertising agencies concentrate on just online advertising.

Team Collaboration Between Experts

Another major advantage of advertising agencies is that many of these experts work together on your advertising campaign. You’ll  likely have at least an account executive, media buyer, and creative content person working on your advertising.

So not only does each bring more expertise to your campaign than you can. But together their combined expertise brings more to  your campaign than any one of them alone could.

Time Saving

Besides applying all this expertise to your advertising campaign, these experts all spend time on your campaign. So that’s time you don’t have to spend.

Even if you are an advertising expert, is doing your own advertising the best use of your time? If your not an advertising expert, doesn’t it make more sense for you to spend your limited time on what you do best?

Three Disadvantages Of
Advertising Agencies

That brings me to the disadvantages of advertising agencies. And the first disadvantage, cost, is the flip side of the same coin as the last advantage, time saving.

Cost

You have to pay for the time and expertise of the agency’s personnel.

Earning expertise in each area of advertising requires a college degree and practical experience. Some employees also get advanced training.

Even new college grads usually have at least a half to a year’s internship, often unpaid internships.  So they’ve invested a lot of time and money to earn their expertise.

Naturally their time isn’t cheap. When you add the agency’s overhead and profit, their time charged to you can get expensive.

Knowledge About Your Business

Another disadvantage of advertising agencies is that, even with all their expertise, they don’t know your business as well as you do. You are the expert on your business. So you have to educate them quickly if you want to get a good advertising campaign.

The more they know about your business, the more effective your advertising campaign will be. If you don’t want to pay them for the time to learn your business, you need to provide them your business information in a brief report.

This report should include your mission, your target market, your product or service, its distinguishing characteristic, and an overview of your past advertising efforts.

Agency/Customer Relationships

Besides the report on your business, you also need to make clear:

• your expectations of the advertising agency personnel,
• your objectives and goals for the advertising campaign,
• the return on advertising investment you expect, and/or
• other ways you will evaluate the campaigns effectiveness.

One of my professor friends, Fred Beard, researched agency/customer relationships for his doctoral dissertation. He found that failing to clarify these expectations is the major cause of poor agency/client relationships.

Conclusion

You have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of advertising agencies in light of your time and money. The more time you spend:

• the less the advertising campaign will cost you,
• the better your relationship with agency personnel will be, and
• the more effective the campaign will be.

Sometimes paying more for to have an advertising agency manage your campaign for you increases  your return on advertisement investment. When you do it yourself, you have to calculate what that time is worth to you concentrating on other parts of your business.

But I realize, that for many small businesses, budgets only enable internally designed and implemented campaigns. Only you can decide how to balance your time and money against the advantages and disadvantages of advertising agencies.

If you like this post, subscribe to my blog and get weekly post summaries. Then you’ll never miss another one that can help your business. Just complete the form below:

Posted 1-22-10:
Advantages And Disadvantages
Of Advertising Agencies

Online audio advertising is growing, with three of the top ten search results returned by Google being online audio advertising companies.

These company sites, ranked 3, 4, 6, and 9, pay affiliates to carry online audio ads on their sites. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate for any of these online audio advertising companies, you can find them at:

Ranked 3: http://www.targetspot.com/home/

Ranked 4: http://www.easyppp.com/

Ranked 6: http://netaudioads.com/

Ranked 9: http://123audioads.com/

What’s great about these companies is that:

• They pay affiliates per view rather than per click,
• Each audio ad is shown only once to each visior, and
• Ads are shown by visitor demographics and interests.

Four of Google results are blogs and one is an Ezine article. The site ranked sixth didn’t come up so I couldn’t review it.

Top 7 Reasons Why
Online Audio Advertising
Is Set To Explode

The number one ranked return on Google, as of today, is an affiliate post on one of the online audio advertising companies.

The author notes in an audio message, that the seven primary reasons to place online audio advertising on your site include:

1. Online audio advertising has proven successful on 240,000 audio sponsored sites. It’s here to stay.
2. Advanced ad distribution technology enables online marketers to optimize for the least intrusion.
3. Third  party audited conduction tests collect statistics to assure advertisers that ads do run. So online audio advertising is traceable and verifiable.
4. The online audio advertising business is expected to grow from $19B to $35B by 2012.
5. Compared to TV ads, online audio advertising is much more targeted. They can be delivered by regions and communities for geographic specific sites. They place ads relevant to the visitor’s interest.
6. More than 30,000 affiliate who have joined the program and prepared 14 M web sites using the audio advertising program.
7. The 66,000 advertisers, with these 5 second ads, include many big 8 advertising firms and fortune 500 companies.

Google Audio Ads For
Radio To Stage A Comeback

The second ranked site is a written blog post about Google’s attempt to be a media broker for radio ads. The author notes that Google’s first attempt failed. Now Google is ready to try again, but this time with a greater focus on online audio advertising, and says:

“Google Online Audio Ads, if extended outside radio, could be great news for podcast producers as well as most of them still haven’t found any decent solution to monetize their podcast shows.”

Monetize Online Music
With Audio Ads

On the seventh ranked page, blogger Sachin Rekhi discusses the online music industry’s lack of innovation. He notes that online audio advertising provides innovation for the music industry:

… the most interesting potential bright spot in online music monetization is monetizing time spent listening through online audio ads. While the online audio ad market is still nascent, the offline radio advertising market is still a $21B industry. The time is now for these dollars to move online in a meaningful away.

Audio Advertising – How To Boost Your Internet Business With Online Audio Advertising – Presentation Transcript

The eighth ranked blog post provides 19 reasons why online marketers should use online audio advertising.

Of these 19 reasons for using online audio advertising, I consider the following ones most helpful.

4. Good marketers split test their sales pages and have come to the conclusion that using audio simply makes the prospective buyer feel more at ease and forges a relationship that is not possible with text alone.
5. Online audio advertising relates not just to the audio on a sales page, but also to any audio used to attract visitors to that sales page. These can include podcasts, interviews and teleconferences as well as a variety of other strategies.
6. The aim of online audio advertising is to gain recognition, build trust and ultimately convert your listeners into buyers.
13. The quality of your audio recording is extremely important. A low quality audio recording will give the impression that you are unprofessional.
17. Online audio advertising is going to become more prominent as the years go by. Many sites now play an audio file as soon as the site loads.
18. The benefits of this are debated, so it is wise to give your visitors the option to play the recording as they wish. You will find that most people will be willing to listen to your audio, provided it is interesting and clear.

Online Audio Advertising – How to Get Started With Audio Marketing For Your Online Business

The tenth ranked page is an Ezine article. It covers four tips on equipment, clarity, personal and outsourcing considerations. The author says that these four tips will help you to use Online audio advertising “in the most effective manner.”

Online Audio Advertising
Conclusion

The variety of blog coverage on online audio advertising and the four companies with affiliate programs for online audio advertising demonstrate the new opportunities available for online marketers.

If you own a blog or site, and you’re  looking for new opportunities to monetize your online business, I recommend that you check out the companies at the top of this post. Find the one that best fits with your business, and see if it will provide a reasonably profitable way to monetize  your business.  I certainly plan to do so.

And if you want to get your site in the top ten results, see The Google Spot Web Marketing System. It provides a step-by-step search engine optimization system based on a real business. It’s a video tutorial system to make learning easy.

If you like this post and want to know when I publish future posts that can help grow your online business, sign up for my weekly blog summaries. Just complete the form below, and I’ll also give  you a copy of my Matrix Market Segmentation Report:

Posted 12-28-09:
Online Audio Advertising
Google Top Ten Results

Modern advertising techniques include seven that you should consider:

1. Email Advertising
2. Video Advertising
3. Audio Advertising
4. Search Advertising
5. Onsite Advertising
6. Mobile Phone Advertising
7. Truck and Car Advertising

I recently completed a series of posts on these modern advertising techniques. The posts provide additional information on each technique so I’ve linked to them when relevant.

Modern Advertising Technique
1. Email Advertising

Email advertising tops this list of modern advertising techniques because it tops the lists of new and growing advertising expenditures. From small Internet marketers to large offline and online stores, email advertising is vital to modern advertising and marketing campaigns.

Modern Advertising Technique
2. Video Advertising

Video Advertising can be done on and off line. Many local cable channels offer video ads and informercials on a search basis for viewers. So your ad is only seen by people interested in what you sell.

Video marketing is also big on the Internet. Most online videos are more promotion than advertisement, but they play an important role in online success.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 5: Television Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
3. Audio Advertising

Audio advertising. whether across the Internet or the airwaves, enables you to target a narrow market and to deliver relevant and timely messages that encourage an immediate response.

Although second to video online, offline audio advertising (radio advertising) provides all the benefits of online audio advertising. And if you advertise on highly targeted stations and shows, it isn’t that expensive.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 6: Radio Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
4. Search Advertising

Search advertising, like Google’s Adwords, can provide much traffic for an online business, but it can also cost far more than it returns in sales. To use search advertising effectively, you need to constantly test your ads. Then rewrite and redesign them from your test results.

There’s both skill and science to search advertising. So before you jump in, read some ebooks and study the search engine’s documents about their pay per click programs.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 7: PPC Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
5. Onsite Advertising

Onsite advertising can be considerably less expensive than search advertising. Generally a click from an ad on site costs less than the same click from a search. With Google’s new AdPlanner, it will be easy to target a market with ads across the Internet. You can even pick the sites that you want to carry your ads and deny ones that you don’t.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 8: On Site Ads

Modern Advertising Technique
6. Mobile Phone Advertising

Mobile phone advertising is projected to grow from just under 500 million in 2006 to a almost 5 billion by 2011.

And why not. It’s interactive, unobtrusive, and immediate. Most people have their mobile phones with them all the time. So they can react instantly to banner phone ads that catch their attention.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 9: Mobile Phone Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
7. Truck and Car Advertising

Do you know that you can:

• have advertising wraps put on everything from semi trucks to your business car?
• rent mobile billboards built on trucks?
• use actors and props to perform your ad in a glass sided truck?

Yes you can do all three, and you can find many businesses on the Internet to help you. You can specify to place your ads only in a specific geographic area,and you still get all the advertising data, like gross rating points.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 10: Truck And Car Advertising

Modern Advertising Techniques
Conclusion

Each of these modern advertising techniques have strengths and weaknesses. Some are more interactive. Some better target a market. Some are better for generating immediate response.

You can read the 11 part series on modern advertising methods, including more detail on the seven techniques in this article. Click the link below to get to the first post in the series:

Modern Advertising Methods

You may also like 3 Advertising Appeals That Can Aid Or Destroy Effectiveness.

To learn more about advertising techniques, see Five Good Advertisement Techniques.

You can assure that you never miss a post relevant to your needs by subscribing to my blog. Just complete the form below:

Submitted to Go articles:
Top 7 Modern Advertising Techniques

Modern advertising techniques include seven that you should consider:

1. Email Advertising
2. Video Advertising
3. Audio Advertising
4. Search Advertising
5. Onsite Advertising
6. Mobile Phone Advertising
7. Truck and Car Advertising

I recently completed a series of posts on these modern advertising techniques. The posts provide additional information on each technique so I’ve linked to them when relevant.

Modern Advertising Technique
1. Email Advertising

Email advertising tops this list of modern advertising techniques because it tops the lists of new and growing advertising expenditures. From small Internet marketers to large offline and online stores, email advertising is vital to modern advertising and marketing campaigns.

Modern Advertising Technique
2. Video Advertising

Video Advertising can be done on and off line. Many local cable channels offer video ads and informercials on a search basis for viewers. So your ad is only seen by people interested in what you sell.

Video marketing is also big on the Internet. Most online videos are more promotion than advertisement, but they play an important role in online success.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 5: Television Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
3. Audio Advertising

Audio advertising. whether across the Internet or the airwaves, enables you to target a narrow market and to deliver relevant and timely messages that encourage an immediate response.

Although second to video online, offline audio advertising (radio advertising) provides all the benefits of online audio advertising. And if you advertise on highly targeted stations and shows, it isn’t that expensive.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 6: Radio Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
4. Search Advertising

Search advertising, like Google’s Adwords, can provide much traffic for an online business, but it can also cost far more than it returns in sales. To use search advertising effectively, you need to constantly test your ads. Then rewrite and redesign them from your test results.

There’s both skill and science to search advertising. So before you jump in, read some ebooks and study the search engine’s documents about their pay per click programs.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 7: PPC Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
5. Onsite Advertising

Onsite advertising can be considerably less expensive than search advertising. Generally a click from an ad on site costs less than the same click from a search. With Google’s new AdPlanner, it will be easy to target a market with ads across the Internet. You can even pick the sites that you want to carry your ads and deny ones that you don’t.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 8: On Site Ads

Modern Advertising Technique
6. Mobile Phone Advertising

Mobile phone advertising is projected to grow from just under 500 million in 2006 to a almost 5 billion by 2011.

And why not. It’s interactive, unobtrusive, and immediate. Most people have their mobile phones with them all the time. So they can react instantly to banner phone ads that catch their attention.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 9: Mobile Phone Advertising

Modern Advertising Technique
7. Truck and Car Advertising

Do you know that you can:

• have advertising wraps put on everything from semi trucks to your business car?
• rent mobile billboards built on trucks?
• use actors and props to perform your ad in a glass sided truck?

Yes you can do all three, and you can find many businesses on the Internet to help you. You can specify to place your ads only in a specific geographic area,and you still get all the advertising data, like gross rating points.

Also see Modern Advertising Methods 10: Truck And Car Advertising

Modern Advertising Techniques: Conclusion

Each of these modern advertising techniques have strengths and weaknesses. Some are more interactive. Some better target a market. Some are better for generating immediate response.

You can read the 11 part series on modern advertising methods, including more detail on the seven techniques in this article. Click the link below to get to the first post in the series:

http://www.strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/modern-advertising-methods-1/

You may also like 3 Advertising Appeals That Can Aid Or Destroy Effectiveness.

To learn more about advertising techniques, see Five Good Advertisement Techniques.

Originally Submitted to Goarticles:
Top 7 Modern Advertising Techniques