How To Use Classified Ads To Build Your Business

There are so many ways that classified ads can help you build your business because although classified ads are brief, getting good results from them takes some thought but the result to your business at the end of the day is simply an amazing one if done the right way.

Also getting the right target for your target audience is an important factor because a well-written ad placed in the wrong publication or displayed online to the entire country won’t bring in much business.

A poor headline or a poorly written ad, no matter how carefully placed, is a waste of money.

For you to be able to achieve great result through your classified ads, follow the following guides:

1. Understand your Customer and What exactly they want

First and fore-most, you need to try to understand your target customers and where to locate them.

Many products and services can be sold to different types of customers but each type may have different needs. Therefore, your ad should stress your ability to meet those specific needs of the customers.

Take the following examples for instance:

– A job seeker may need your help not only writing their resume, but also distributing it to online sites where it will get found.

– The owner of a small business may not know they want a “virtual assistant.” They may only know they need a freelancer to do their bookkeeping and/or help them build a social presence online.

Therefore, to make your ads work, your classified ads need to speak directly to what the customer is looking for.

2. Choose the right media source for you Ad Outreach

Bear in mind that for your ads to work and attract customers for your, you must channel the advertisements to the right audience through their right location.

For instance, an ad for pool maintenance services is likely to attract more responses in publications that circulate in upper-class communities than in a weekly shopper that gets distributed in a blue-collar neighborhood.

Also, you’ll waste a lot of money on your ad for your landscaping service if you advertise on search engines and don’t geo-target the ad (I.e., have the search engines only show your ad to people from the geographic area you’re able to serve.)

Be aware that individuals often read the classified ads sections of several different publications, but read each with a different mindset. A business executive might look in the local newspaper for someone to paint her house, but turn to a regional business publication to find a contractor to perform similar services for her business property.

3. Do some Homework before placing the Classified Ads

Advertising is not just all about placing an ad on a page and relax to expect its result. You have to study ads that appear consistently week after week and try to determine what makes such ads catch your attention. Do they mention a benefit? Are they set off in some way from other classified ads on the page? Are they easy to spot because they fall immediately under a category heading in the classified section or near the top of the ads on an online search?

If you can figure out the answers to those questions then you can use them as a guide to place your own ad in the right place and position for a better result.

4. Make the first few words of your ads count

Do you know that the first couple of ads in your classified ad work just like a headline does on a display ad? Therefore you must try to make it look very catchy in a way that they must stop the reader’s eye from moving down or across the page and make them want to read the rest of the ad.

But in order to achieve that, those first couple of words must tell readers the most important benefit your product or service offers.

Also, even in online pay-per-click ads the ad should reflect as closely as possible the terms the searcher typed into the search engine.

5. Keep the ad very Brief and Explicit

A good and well written classified ad should be short, clear and commanding.

All you need to do is that try in as few words as possible, tell what you sell, who should buy it, why they should buy it from you today, and how to contact you.

Related: The Complete 12-Step Guide to Starting a Business

6. Make it Believable and Appropriate

Our world is advancing and so also are the people in it. Today’s consumers are more educated and more skeptical than consumers ever were in the past. If your ad sounds like you are offering something too good to be true, most people will skip right over your ad.

Furthermore if you make unfounded income claims or health claims that are not substantiated by scientific evidence, you could get yourself in trouble with the law. To win customers and avoid trouble, sell with facts, not hype.

7. Look for your Competitors and Join them where they are

Ensure that you place your advertisement in the same publications and same online media that your competitors do. Look through a year’s worth of back issues of a publication. If competitors have been advertising consistently in that publication for a year, it’s likely to be a good place to put your ad, too. Try to determine what keywords your competitors are using to promote their business online. Use similar keywords in your own ads.

8. Test your ad in several publications

Two publications that seem to be aimed at the same readers won’t necessarily produce the same results. A Long Island painter who got no response from ads placed in one weekly newspaper, for instance, got numerous responses from ads in a competing publication in the same community.

Meanwhile, The only way to tell which publications are the best for you is to test your ad in several. Test your ads in several places online, too. An ad that works on Google may or may not work on FaceBook, Bing, or LinkedIn.

Therefore testing your ad in several publications gives you a clearer view of where the ad can perform better or not.

9. Don’t plan to make a killing with just one ad

Your ads should run long enough to give it a fair trial because even having your business ad appear on a regular basis builds name recognition and convinces prospects your business is not a fly-by-night firm.

You must also Proofread your ads carefully before placing them and be sure you include a phone number or other contact information in the ad.

You can also have someone else proofread your final version for typos and misspellings before placing your final ad.

Ready to start Advertising? Click here to “Place your New Ad with us”

You can also visit here to learn more about “Classified Advertisement”.