By David Tingley, editor and company director
We’ve been in the publishing business since 2009, and so we’d like to address a few questions that potential advertisers have for us, head-on. Right here. We aren’t in business to trick or hood-wink businesses out of marketing spend, but what we want is for local businesses in the area to making more money in sales from the advertising they do with us… Sounds simple, right?
PRINT ADS DON’T WORK ANY MORE, DO THEY?
It’s true that not ALL advertisers who spend money with us in Hurst Life (or Kipper Life family of magazine titles) make a return on their investment.
That’s always gutting for us. But there’s no point lying.
Sometimes it’s not always obvious why the advertising hasn’t worked. While, for others, there were some warnings. Your advert needs to not only look good, but look appropriate for your target market.
Years ago, I had a builder whose advert I offered to ‘improve’ with a bit of ‘slick design’ to drag the advert and his business (I thought) into the 21st century. Having designed the revamped advertisement, we ran it for a further few months, until I took a call from the customer. He explained that his enquiries had dropped off since changing the advert design, and he’d like to revert to his basic, Powerpoint slide layout which he had been using for months beforehand very successfully. So, you see, as a professional designer - I learnt a valuable lesson that day about making the advert look right for the business and the target audience. They didn’t want a ‘slick’ builder!
Having said that, if an advert has way too much text on, and really isn’t legible in print - the advert just won’t work, if people can’t read it.
We hear from customers who sometimes say that their advertising campaign with us ‘hasn’t worked’, but when we ask how the customer finds out where their new enquiries come from - they tell us that they don’t ask! On this basis, it would be hard to measure the success of any advertising campaign in any media!
Of course, smaller adverts do have to work harder than full page ads. The bigger the ad, the larger the passing impact on the readers.
Some advertisers have a seemingly brilliant advert design (bold, colourful, large headline, clear call-to-action), and they haven’t been stingy on the size either. And it still doesn’t generate the results for them. I wish I knew why this was. We had a mortgage broker who had completed an advertising campaign for six months with half page ads, and they had had no clear leads from the run in our magazine.
Conversely, and more positively, we have one customer who runs a few quarter page ads per year, and the results from it, keeps them busy for the season! And the ad is even at quarter page size!
Fortunately we have plenty of happy advertisers, many of whom have been advertising with us for years and years. You can see Caroline Telfer talking about her long term success with our magazines here. And Terry Matthews talks about his regular ads with us in this video too.
So, can I guarantee that advertising with Hurst Life will bring in new customers? No, of course not.
But I will guarantee that me and my team will do our absolute best to make it work for your business. Whether that’s helping with the ad design, giving you a premium spot for a special month, a bit of editorial copy or even a cheeky size upgrade when we’ve got some extra. We really do just want advertising with us to work for you, so you stay a customer for years - just like Richard and Adam and the dozens of others.