How effective is advertising?

[flashgordon12345]

hi,
I've got about £5k+ to spend on advertising (to start with).
I've created a new card game.
At the moment the plan is to go to a lot of game conventions first to promote it, give out freebies etc promote on website, facebook etc.

I was looking into putting ads in magazines, a full page ad is £600, last issue sold 10k copies.
So i'd need to sell 75 of my game to get that money back.

Wondering how effective is advertising, as when I used to hand out flyers I'd only get a 2% return (as in 2% bought the product).
So would magazines be higher? or is there a business standard to 2-5% on all adverts.

Or is there better ways i.e. facebook ads? youtube ads?

thanks

 

[Gregory007]

The simple answer is that you will have to test the advertising and make a decision on it. You may need to make a judgement as to where your idel customers are as you have a small budget then just test the traffic - see what happens and then adjust strategy accordingly.

This is the only way you will get meaniful data for your business - you cannot use someone else's data as you will not be targeting the same customers (hint - see were your competitors are advertising )

 

[garyk]

Who are your target market? Once you have identified that then decide if the publication fits your target market. This type of advertising is typically scatter gun, i.e. the number of actual prospects interested in your product or service is small.

You would be better nailing down your target and perhaps try some facebook advertising and split testing age groups and only spend £5 a day. With something like a card game it lends itself to videos showing people playing.

But...before all of that do what you are planning....get out there and talk/demo to people....all the time!

 

[Easy Loans Company]

There's no guarantees when it comes to advertising spend. Some trial and error is involved in finding out what works. In my experience, press advertising is very hit and miss. And more miss than hit most of the time. Depends on the product.

Online is the way to go to start. Set up some adwords campaigns to test which keywords bring in visitors. Social media is also a good one to try as they can target certain demographics which would fit for your game.

 

[DanielGillen]

I've been running Google, Facebook and Bing ads for my clients for years, if it didn't work they wouldn't still be paying me

If I was you I would start off by putting a little money into Facebook ads to raise your profile, as well as the offline areas you mentioned.

 

[Connexions]

You should consider going the kickstarter route. New board/card games can do very well on there. However, depends on what the game is all about.

https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/games/tabletop games

Better than spending money on advertising.

 

[Alan]

This is a visual representation of survey data back from about 2011, it probably holds true today

https://connect.goalscape.com/#/goal/6431B0BA-2751-7730-3AD7-07BA4B5ADD52/note/0

 

[MichaelRichardson]

Hey

Marketing is just hit and trail game… You can never tell which platform will give you more traffic.

So try to market everywhere (preferably free platform as you have low budget) like social media sites.

If you also want to attract traffic offline then you can go for banners and all… as these are also cheap way to advertise.

And if you want to invest more money then you can go for PPC ads.

 

[Alan]

Personally I wouldn't try everything in a haphazard way.

They way I would do it is using a testing approach.

I would list all the mechanisms you can think of, you'll find well over 10.

Then guess the top three that will give you a return.

Then assign a budget to those and test them and measure effectiveness (ROI).

Free is an illusion, social media is not free as it takes time and time is money, you should test if you think there is a ROI, but track your time.

Return on investment is key, not cheapness. i.e if you invest £1 and get £2 back you should invest £100,000 and get £200,000 back - if you invest £1 and you get £0.50p back - stop that channel.

 

[ethical PR]

Hey

Marketing is just hit and trail game… You can never tell which platform will give you more traffic.

So try to market everywhere (preferably free platform as you have low budget) like social media sites.

If you also want to attract traffic offline then you can go for banners and all… as these are also cheap way to advertise.

And if you want to invest more money then you can go for PPC ads.

Unfortunately that's possibly one of the worst pieces of marketing advice I have seen on here.

Of course you can tell which channels are most effective for you. And you certainly shouldn't try and market everywhere a waste of money, time and effort.

If you do your research and understand which audiences you want to target and the communications channels they use, how to differeniate yourself from your competitors and you have developed a strong compelling offer, you will have the tools you need to develop a marketing plan.

This will help you understand which channels you need to focus on - off and online which will push people towards making a sale and which grow your brand awareness.

 

[Ikkie]

it depend on type of business, if you're online store then it worth having advertisement. but if its high street business then i may not be too sure.

 

[TrefG]

What type of game is it? What is your target market?

There are lots of possible approaches to get traffic to your site, but converting that traffic into an engaged audience and sales is the hard part.

My initial strategy would be to push a little traffic to my website and spend some time making sure the site was the very best it can be in terms of encouraging my target market to buy or engage when they land on the site - but to do this properly you really need to start with understanding your target audience.

Once I knew my website had a good chance of converting, I'd start to look into spending money on advertising wherever my target audience hangs out.

Spending money blindly without knowing your audience or knowing you have a chance of converting them is generally a recipe for failure.

Happy to help more if you can provide some further details?

Tref

 

[Large-Format-Banners]

Hi flashgordon12345,

It may be easier for you to look at the people you want to sell to (try to define them a little) and then target your approach towards them (what blogs they read, what keywords are used to search such games, etc.). For example, keyword/monthly search volume: free card games/8100, solitaire card games/5400, list of card games/3600, card games for two/3600. When you start there and follow the results, you will quickly find out that you have a lot of opportunities to promote your card game (online and offline). When you have gathered some ideas, the best way could be to create a plan for at least 4 different approaches. For example:

Magazine A
Budget: £1000
Frequency of Publications (it is better to have 4 adverts for 4 issues as a quarter size than one full page ad for one month).
You could create a "special landing page on your website" and show it on this print ad (keeping the URL very short and easy to type in), so that you can manage the ROI properly. You could also create a special email, too.
Before you start, make sure that the circulation is audited by a third party, otherwise don't do it.

You could choose different magazines (need to read them yourself and check if the readership is the right one (see if your competitors are in there, too, if they are, then it could be a positive sign).

I suggest thinking about Facebook advertising as it is much cheaper than PPC on Google.

It could also help to create your own little exhibition stand and use business banners ( w w w . m e d i a c o . c o . u k /business-banners.html) to attract leads.

Try to gather at least 30 testimonials, create flyers to showcase them and if you can, try to create 10 video testimonials, too. All need to underline the fun the people experienced.

Hope this helps

 

[flashgordon12345]

hey guys so i've been spending money on facebook and adword adds, at the moment a facebook like is costing 38p which I think is high? how do I get that down to say 10p?? any advice?

 

[flashgordon12345]

would it be best spending £400 on adword/facebook or on a ad in a mag that has 80,000 unique visitors a month?

 

[Alan]

The difference between Adwords/Facebook and Ads in mags are that the former are more targeted.

e.g. if you set up AdWords correctly to will be presenting your Ad at exactly the right part of the potential customers buying cycle. i.e. when he is actively searching, rather than passively reading.

Hence the ROI on PPC and SEO, done correctly appears much higher than print or even passive placement Ads.

I will refer again to my visual repsentation of a survey, that basically says it all
https://connect.goalscape.com/#/goal/6431B0BA-2751-7730-3AD7-07BA4B5ADD52/note/0

In my personal experience, print or passive advertising and cold calling has never got me any meaningful business, yet PPC, SEO and Direct mail have.

 

[stevebrownlie]

Best way to appear in 'mags': Get them to write about you for free because they like the product (ie PR) because people actually read editorial. They're pretty blind to banner ads and so on (I'm assuming your target mag is online since you say unique visitors).

Best way to advertise: Highly targeted ads cleverly crafted to catch your exact audience's attention on social - eg Facebook.

 

[JD@fifty6]

Personally I'd be thinking of investigating what you already now a little more too. You know that you get a 2% conversion from flyers, which isn't exactly awful for flyers.

Get a person from each of 5 cities to hand out 100 flyers an hour each and you'll cover their costs if you can maintain the 2% conversion rate. That way you're creating some 'buzz' while still being able to explore some of the other options that have been mentioned in this thread.

I'd suggest working with someone who has experience in making this sort of business grow if you can – doing it all yourself can be tempting, but using the experience of others will definitely speed up the process.

 

[DoItRight73]

There has been some interesting answers to your questions.

If we knew what type of card game it was I think it would.

For examples sake let's say your card game is similar to blackjack.

Here is the kind of research I would do to find my audience firstly from Google.

My search strings would be

Blackjack + forum
Blackjack + blog
Blackjack + association
Blackjack + society
Blackjack + website

I would look at all of the listings above and see what demographical info I could get.

You can get this info from similarweb as well as a list of similar websites.

I would make a note of all the high traffic sites in the list and head over to Facebook ads manager to see how many of these sites had a fan page. If they have a fan page I add them to my interest and keep adding them until I had a large audience.

Once I had this audience which is super targeted. I would be looking for some content to draw them in.

I'd create a fan page for this.

In answer to your question of lowering your costs per engagement.

Video would be your weapon of choice.

You can video views on Facebook for as little as .0003 it happens every day, I know a lot of people including myself that this works for.

It does take some testing before you get there but when your spending £5 with the potential to reach a few 100,000 views per day you can afford to test. Plus your audience is super targeted.

The type of content you want to use is something that is already viral. When people like your video you start to get free exposure and sometimes that organic exposure eclipses the views from the paid portion.

You don't want to sell straight away mind. You want to build for exposure and get your audience engaged.

You can find viral content on buzzsumo.

Once you have a good sized audience that engages with your content you can start to sell to them with a compelling offer.

I use this strategy a lot with great results. Hopefully you will get a few ideas on how to put your own spin on it so that it works for you.

Good luck in your venture!

 

[peggiiii]

The advertising industry, as a whole, has the poorest quality-assurance systems and turns out the most inconsistent product (their ads and commercials) of any industry in the world. This might seem like an overly harsh assessment, but it is based on testing thousands of ads over several decades. In our experience, only about half of all commercials actually work; that is, have any positive effects on consumers’ purchasing behavior or brand choice. Moreover, a small share of ads actually appear to have negative effects on sales. How could these assertions possibly be true? Don’t advertising agencies want to produce great ads? Don’t clients want great advertising? Yes, yes, they do, but they face formidable barriers.

 

[YIVA Digital]

The world of advertising is moving towards digital. It means performance in digital marketing are much more easier to test, measure, analyse and optimise.

Card game industry is a competitive market. £600 for 10K readership is not too bad. I will as well suggest you try to promote your product on social media such as Facebook.

 

[fisicx]

Codswallop.

The most effective advertising is still non-digital. Marketing may be moving more online but advertising struggles, especially as more and more people are using adblockers.

 

[DoItRight73]

Codswallop.

The most effective advertising is still non-digital. Marketing may be moving more online but advertising struggles, especially as more and more people are using adblockers.

I would agree with you that direct sales marketing reduces the clutter of competition in terms of positioning yourself in a 1 on 1 environment.

PPV remains a very stong effective platform for people and businesses. At this point in time there is no software out there to turn off banners or text ads from a website, blog or forum, plus all of the big social networks are pushing hard for businesses to buy ads everyday.

I think the main difference between the offlline/online world is the price wouldn't you say?

Online spending keeps rising year by year whilst offline spending decreases and I can't see a reversal taking place anytime soon can you?

I think that if there was a real struggle with online advertising the numbers would reflect that, the forecast doesn't show a slope in growth it shows considerable growth especially in the mobile device industry.

 

[fisicx]

At this point in time there is no software out there to turn off banners or text ads from a website, blog or forum.

Yes there is. I'm using it right now. I haven't seen an advert on any site for years.

 

[DoItRight73]

Yes there is. I'm using it right now. I haven't seen an advert on any site for years.

I'm aware you can block banners & text ads from advertising platforms, but the same software you use will still show in-house ads, plus search engines (websites) will always show text ads regardless of the software you use.

Big corporations like Google, Amazon etc just wouldn't allow anybody to block every single ad online.

The software "for now" just doesn't exist.

 

[Court Jester]

I've created a new card game

sounds like 'Destination London' off Dragons den..... very tough to get going, I think that entrepreneur went to Hamleys and got a display promotion going, then called the media.

As far as online promos go, you need weblinks on targeted sites to do this, and rely on word of mouth for the results/sales.

 

[Court Jester]

The world of advertising is moving towards digital

Agreed - but insert 'is digital' for accuracy. The web is it, the ultimate marketing weapon (if you can find the right sites -- that is!). Id say the issue with the web is its still expensive with many biz's levying heavy fees - er, online and trying to get away with it.

 

[beasty]

Go visit stores that are your likely stockists and find out what they suggest
Asking people who clearly cannot see past their own business is not going to offer you any truth
Take a look at your most obvious rivals and see where and how they advertise

 

[Mike Wilford]

One possible solution is In-App advertising in Adwords.

This places your ad inside other games of people who are playing on their mobiles - so sounds like a good audience to target.

 

[Watson91]

I'd suggest trying reaching out to some influencers in your industry. Since your product is likely fairly inexpensive (compared to, say, a new car), why not send a few free products to trusted authorities in your field?

I don't know anything about your industry, but plenty of retail sectors have enthusiastic ambassadors who review, discuss and promote new products on places like YouTube or Wordpress. Send them a freebie with an upfront note introducing yourselves and asking for an honest review on their website. Positive reviews will go a long way, and you haven't really spent much money.