Online Marketing: “What’s In It For Me?” Asks Your Customer…

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline, businessfromhomework

 By Kenneth Koh |

If you are serious about doing business online, it’s important to learn how to do online business advertising. Whether the traffic source is free or paid, if you do not understand the basics of doing online advertising, the traffic you’ve generated will be wasted.

Recently a ‘rich’ surveying company advertised with us. When I looked at the ad, I almost fainted. It was a simple sign up form, expecting people to sign up without telling them anything about the company or the offer. Isn’t it common sense to ask oneself “will I act on this ad?” before one spend money advertising the ad?

In today’s discussion on how to do online business advertising, I’m going to share with you 3 “MUST-HAVE” elements in your ad before you even start thinking where to advertise it.

Hope that helps.

1. WIIFM “in 5 seconds”

WIIFM stands for “what’s in it for me”.

If you don’t tell people what’s in it for them, they are not going to be interested in your ad, not to mention taking action.

The problem with many advertisers is that their WIIFM is scattered all over the sales copy. One has to seriously read through the sales copy to identify them. Unfortunately, most sales copies are not read and thus the WIIFM message is not delivered.

For effective online business advertising, your ad must address the question of WIIFM within 5 seconds after a prospect first look at your ad. If not, you are losing them, period.

This means your headline, subheadline and the first paragraph of your sales copy play an important role in deciding whether a prospect will continue reading your ad or simply leave the page.

2. Become their friends “in 10 seconds”

Once you successfully capture their attention with WIIFM, you next objective is to gain their confidence in you and/or your offer.

Common ways to achieve this include the follow tricks:

- adding testimonials, especially ones with photographs;
- showing your own photograph and disclosing your name, email address and even contact number;
- showing other proofs such as earning screenshots, samples of completed work etc.

3. “Impossible-to-miss” call for action

Lastly, you must tell your prospect what to do next.

The problem with many advertisers is that their call for action is hidden somewhere in the sales letter. If it takes even 10 seconds for the prospects to search for the call for action, most of them would rather click the close window button.

The 3 elements above are the bare minimum that you must have in your ad if you want to do any online business advertising.

In additional to these 3, try to build a list regardless of what online business you’re advertising. The main advantage of online advertising vs offline advertising is that it’s easy to capture clients’ database. In the world of business, winners are those who own the customers. Think Walmart vs wholesaler. Think Ebay vs its sellers. The ones with huge customer base win. Regardless of what business you’re in, you are in the business of building customers.

Tweet This Post 

Technorati Tags: online marketing