Recently Grex has spent small amounts of money on advertisements. (One ad in the "Once Upon a Mattress" program and one in the ConFusion program.) But the fact is that we lack, at the moment, a strategy for deciding: 1. how much money to spend on advertising, 2. where to place ads, and 3. what they should look like. I'll be the first to admit that I am completely clueless about these issues. I've entered this item to solicit some ideas on an "advertising strategy". Mary Remmers suggested that the amount spent on advertising be linked with the amount of profit made by the Grex store. That's one way to answer question number 1, but I have no idea if it's a reasonable one. So, please post your ideas here.18 responses total.
I would suggest that the amount spent on advertising in a particular place should also depend on the response we get from that place. I think we might get a lot of new users from an ad in the Observer -- but I've held off because there are other, cheaper ways to advertise. And I think we'd have to run the ad for several months to know whether it was working. If we found a place that brought folks in in droves then it would certainly be worth a bigger budget than repeated advertising that was cheaprt, but never brought anyone in.
you're asking for the holy grail. every advertiser will kill for the place to run such an ad.
Does anyone out there have any experience placing ads?
Yes. I do.
Mostly what I have been thinking of is "niche marketing" of the conferences. I did the flyer for the music conferences -- so far ineffectual, as far as I can tell, and the flyer is not snazzy enough. Someone else wanted to make a flyer promoting the gaming (Amalgam) conference for distribution at the big games store on South U. The ConFusion program book is a move in much the same direction; it's designed specifically to appeal to science fiction fans. What are the Observer ad rates? Maybe if we know what the target is, we can see if some folks want to pledge money towards an Observer ad to run for some number of months. (And what are the ad rates for the CURRENT?) I don't see any reason to link ad expenditures to the performance of the Grex store. Certainly we shouldn't advertise ourselves into insolvency. But ads are not like Grex store stock: they are a pure cash outlay with no expectation of (immediate) return.
I guess I agree - I don't see why it should be linked to the store either. Mary, do you want to defend that idea? What I'm trying to decide right now is whether to implement Mary's idea of separating out store finances and advertisements into a "promotional fund" on the treasurer's report. Doing so kind of tacitly links advertising expenditures to store profit. I'm not sure we're ready to do that. Maybe I'll just go ahead and show everything coming from the general fund this month, and we can sort it out differently next month if need be.
Whether advertising is directly linked to store profits isn't something I find worth a lot of defense. It just seemed like a natural extension as t-shirts, mugs and mousepads essentially are advertisements. So using some of the store's profits to advertise Grex in other ways seemed like a good idea. Advertising is also a lower priority item in the budget and if the store wasn't bringing in much profit then how nice that the profit wasn't being counted on elsewhere, like for the phone bill.
OK, I've decided for the moment to separate out store transactions but to call the separate entity "Store Cash Balance". We'll see if it makes sense to people.
It looked okay to me. It did end up with the General Fund being larger than the bank ballance, tho.
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I looked into the ad prices in Current. It has thew advantage of being something people keep around for a month for reference (much like the Observer) but a "business card sized" ad is about $30 a month. Again, it's in the back of the magazine -- real ads with good spots cost lots more -- but it has the additional advantage that peoiple open Current whgen they want to find a way to entertain themselves. That fits rather nicely with Grex, I think. We're fun!
As already mentioned, the big thing about spending money on advertising is monitoring the results and then modifying the strategy based on those results. It seems to me that we need to agree how we measure the results. Are we looking for more users, more local users, more conference users, or what? Having said that, one low-cost, but potentially effective way to advertise is in the AA News. They have a small section on page A4 or A5 called "Bulletin Board" that consists of small, text-only ads. I know that I always read the ads in this section.
do we have software monitoring new accounts and new members over time? it would seem a fairly simple way of measuring. the only difficulty i see would be controlling for multiple accounts of individual users.
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Yup, that would be my goal too, but I gather the point was to come up with some criteria by which we can measure the success of our advertising.
right. what i'm thinking is something which would puul from the log such things as: from where new users are coming (indication of whether they might have been affected by our ad efforts) when the new user first used the system (chronological association with ad efforts) this could be combined with similar information about new *members*, and scanned for trends or peaks which might be associatable with any advertising. where they heard about us, too. (almost forgot that one)
I've used the observer bulletin board before with some results. the cost is something like $3.50 per line depending on how many days you run the ad. for $30.00-40.00 you could try it and see if you get any bites. that price is for 3-5 days depending on line count.
The types of "measurement" described in #16 are much more likely to give us accurate information than asking ppl where they heard about us. People just don't remember things like that. If it is a trusted source, whether written or oral, what they will remember is that they trusted the source from which they go tthe information. If they have a friendly feeling towards a certain newspaper (for example), they may well remember that they heard about us,and that they had a friendly feeling twoards the source, and decide that they heard about us from a "friend". When marketers of "single-purchase" items, like cars, are trying to assess the value of a given ad campaign, they ask if ppl remembe it, not if it caused them to go out and buy one of their cars. They ask how the ads made them feel towards teh product, not if they marched, zombie-like, to the nearest dealer. Eh, what do I know?
You have several choices: