What forms of advertising are available to you in Cookeville? Should you advertise your local business Offline or Online? You can better decide that once you understand the buying process a person goes through before spending money on a service or a product. It could take days, even years for a person to go through this process.

Understanding this journey will assist you in determining what advertising methods would work best in spreading your message. We will be discussing reach and estimated cost between traditional offline advertising and Online Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Typical Consumer Buying Process:

Most all consumers have the same pre-defined actions before buying Anything! Listed below are the purchasing steps people like you and I unknowingly use.

Potential customers become aware that they have a need, want or problem
They gather information about the product, service or solution that could possibly fix their problem
They ask their friends opinions, read customer reviews & consumer reports, watch videos and the list of fact-finding research methods goes on
Only then, when people have gathered this information, do they feel comfortable enough to make a buying decision. The information gathering phase accounts for roughly 95% of a client’s buying process. This leaves only 5% of customers ready to buy at any given time.

What does this have to do with advertising in Cookeville?

Simply put, the buying process is common to all potential customers. When you advertise your business in Cookeville or your Cookeville business to potential clients in Nashville or Knoxville, you must understand who your message will reach and when. Telling the world about your business is only effective if it produces a return on investment, Right? In order to produce result oriented advertising you must inform shoppers and provide buyers with exactly what they are looking for, giving them incentive to buy.

Offline Advertising

Advertisers in Cookeville can choose Offline Advertising in the forms of radio, TV, newspapers or other publications and billboards. Average monthly cost for these services when opting in for minimum exposure can cost you an estimated $20-$35 a day. That translates into an average of $825mo or $9900 a year.

These forms of advertising can take your message into Cookeville alone or to people all around the Upper Cumberland area. Constant exposure can brand your business by “keeping your name out there” in the community to shoppers and attract potential buyers along the way.

How it Works

Essentially it comes down to exposing a message or multiple messages to the people who read a particular paper or publication, use a common street, listen to the radio or watch TV in a predefined area or location. The goal here is to advertise to the majority and hope you catch some buyers along the way. In theory you are only advertising to 5% of the population for direct response.

Now, I understand, you are advertising to everyone in your chosen area, but only five percent of the given population will be ready to buy today. It is important that you position your ads in order to market to the all the potential customers that may come in contact with your advertising.

It is best to provide an informational message that speaks directly to the 95% of people who are gathering information about the products or services you offer. You will also want to provide your viewers or listeners an alternative message driven towards direct sales in order to support the cost of your advertising. This increases your exposure, branding your business by informing shoppers and giving buyers what they are looking for with good reason to complete their buying process.

If you are a small business trying to grow, you will most likely want to keep your message focused towards the 5% of the people on the verge of buying. Dealing with smaller budgets requires you to increase you odds for making sales and money immediately from your advertising. Although it will cost more than the estimate above, it is always a good idea to multiply these messages on different advertising platforms, including online advertising for maximum results.

As with most advertising, the more you spend, the more people your message is exposed to, the more your chances increase for making sales along the way.

Online Advertising

Advertisers in Cookeville who choose Online Advertising can advertise on major Search Engines, Social Media sites and on literally hundreds of thousands of websites relevant to your business. Average monthly cost for professionally managed online advertising when opting in for minimum exposure will cost you an estimated $16 a day or $492mo or $5899 a year.

Don’t have a website? You don’t need one! Unless you intend to build your online presence for sales and branding together, then you will need a professional website. A fully customized, search engine optimized website will run you an estimated $1000. This is the real deal. Add that to the total cost and you are looking at $19 a day or $575mo or $6899 a year.

Online advertising does exactly the same thing as above, plus so much more. You can take your message to Cookeville alone or to people all around the Upper Cumberland area. Online advertising also gives you the ability to advertise your business to multiple cities of choice or entire states across the US. You can even take your business advertising global if you so desire. That’s not all, you can also add multiple ads or advertising messages whenever you want and target your customers with keyword terms so the right message is reaching the appropriate clients.

How it Works

Online advertising is most commonly implemented through one of many pay-per-click (PPC) programs. These programs are offered by the worlds largest search engines or websites. Google by far being the leader, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook are a few you can probably relate too. With the one time account setup, you essentially tell the PPC provider who, when, where and what.

For Example: Let’s say you own a lawn equipment business and you sell weedeaters, lawn mowers and leaf blowers. With pay-per-click you target customers by using targeted keyword searches producing as many ads as needed to get your message(s) out to the right people.

You start by building one ad for lawn mowers that will target anybody searching online for the key terms – JD ZX9 Super Model, zero turn lawn mowers and lawnmower shops near Cookeville. By doing this you target the 5% of buyers who are looking to buy a commercial lawn mower close to Cookeville. Next you place another ad about lawn mowers but this time you target customers looking for service. So your ad reads, “Get Your Lawn Mower Ready for Spring – Blade Sharpening to Full Service – Call Now for More Information.” You set it up so only people searching for the key terms – Lawn mower service, lawn mower blade sharpening and lawn equipment service see it. This ensures your getting the right message to the right people 24 hours a day seven days a week.

The cycle can go on and on to target weedeaters and leaf blowers as well. Before running these ads in what we call ‘Traffic’ you also tell your PPC provider to do a few other things as well. Things like only spend $250 a month or $8.30 a day, only show my ads to people searching for these exact terms and only show my ads to people within a ten mile radius of Cookeville, Crossville and Smithville. You have complete control over your advertising.

Drill down further and place ads like “Bob’s Lawn Shop – Lawn Mowers, Leaf Blowers & Weedeaters – 10% off Service During May” and place these ads on many other relevant websites. For instance, I send you an email asking you if you know of a place that sharpens lawn mower blades. You reply with a no, but because the conversation is relevant, your ad is showing on the side of the page and catches my attention. Or, perhaps, your target customer is looking on Lowe’s website at zero turn mowers and he spots your ad (like a billboard) on the side of the page and clicks through to your website. You could even set it up where they simply click the ad to call your business immediately from there mobile phone because you provide what they need today, locally. This is a great way to catch shoppers nearing their final buying decision through mass marketing. Keep in mind, there are no additional cost.

The Biggest difference with online advertising is you only pay when someone visits your website “Internet Store Front” or takes action from your advertisement. By targeting pre-qualified customers where they live (home, work, cell phone) at exactly the time they are looking for your businesses service, product, location or solution, you increase your chances of return on investment. This takes the “Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” aspect out as well because you choose who sees your ad, when they see it and what information they get when they take action. The best part is you can collect data by tracking conversions and begin to filter out what doesn’t work and build upon the target markets that are producing revenue for your business.

With 91 million searches a day on Google alone, people are looking for your business by way of the internet. When is the last time you cut out a newspaper ad, pulled over to write down a number or hunted up a phone book?

Advertising Comparison

-Offline Advertising

Pros:

Reaches local customers with option of running multiple messages
Targets customers throughout the buying process
Brands your business image in your selected viewing area
Cons:

Short ad exposure times
Unable to target any deeper than location or interests
No precise way to track results or effectiveness
Estimated Cost: $825 a month

-Online Advertising

Pros:

Only pay when someone acts upon your advertising message
Target pre-qualified customers with specific ads for sales and branding anywhere in the world
Capability of tracking data, optimizing to eliminate non productive advertising thereby producing increased results over time
Ability to pause, change or adjust your advertising any time day or night without any contracts
Cons:

A professional website is crucial for long term advertisers
Complex. Needs professional management for best results
Setup takes 2-3 weeks
Estimated Cost: $575 a month

Advertisers from the Middle Tennessee area have some very good choices for advertising there local business to the people of Cookeville. You know your business and hopefully this information will give you better insight on not only how you can advertise your business but also what cost will typically be involved.

Feel free to research this subject more at your own leisure. You can find information through the internet from advertisers websites, additional articles and even forums/blogs describing peoples own unique experience with offline and online advertising.

Here in the UK many millions of pounds are spent on a regular basis on advertising.We have come to associate certain TV programmes with products (Coronation Street and chocolate, Dominos pizza and Britains Got Talent, for example), we hum the tunes of annoying advertisement jingles (we buy any car dot com), straplines and catchphrases from advertisements have worked their way into our conversations and sense of humour (simples!), certain famous faces represent a product we recognise before remembering who they really are, we read about the latest films on the back of cereal packets during breakfast, we get pop-up messages on websites, direct mail through our doors and shoved into our newspapers and magazines, we even have big yellow books filled with advertising that we are given for free… And this is only the bigger budget stuff I am referring to… I have not even mentioned advertising on the sides of buses and other vehicles, for example.I have a few friends who insist that advertising does not influence them in the slightest, in fact, they swear blind that they buy other things in particular to move away from buying into big budget advertising campaigns…. I doubt they are typical.Advertisers continue to invest money in delivering their messages in the hope and with the aim that we absorb the information and subsequently have our buying habits altered and influenced. They want us to buy their product rather than others and to make a choice for their service instead of their competitors. They want us to feel like we are missing out on something if we buy cheaper, they want their product to appear more attractive and so on and so on…Advertising is everywhere and anywhere. The messages contained within it range from basic to complex, from basic imagery, to surreal concepts. What’s more, I am regularly told by colleagues, peers, friends and others, that advertising is a form of hypnosis.Is it actually?It is clear for anyone to see that advertisers do utilise a range of suggestive techniques to attempt to influence you to invest in their service or product.Often they attempt to creating a need for their product, I mean I can remember when moisturising really was not something men did and I cannot recall there being moisturisers aimed at men when I was growing up. Yet today, I have several different kinds making my bathroom cabinet bulge as i simply need to have different moisturisers for post-shave, post-shower, before going to bed and after a day in the sun etc, etc.On other occasions, advertisers employ techniques whereby they want you to identify with the people (or individual) featured in their advertisement so that you can be like them if you have their product, or you can also solve your issue by using the same product, or your family will be happy if you share this product with them.These advertisers will even then tell you what a brilliant, informed and intelligent choice you made by choosing their product, they may remind you of how wise you are for having made this choice, and how better your life (and the life of your family) will be now that you chose their product. They may attempt to make you feel sexy, clever, enlightened, responsible or whatever it takes for you to choose that product or service.Then there are those others who have a man in a white coat holding a test tube, who is clearly an expert scientist, who tells you that this product is proven to work and that we must not read the small print at the foot of the advertisement telling us it only works that way for 55% of people in a randomised trial. Yes, scientific data covers our advertisements as a way of authenticating the product.I have friends, mentors who have written book upon book on influence and persuasion and advertising, I could not do this subject any justice in one single blog entry, this is a much more complex subject indeed… the point that I am making here is that many people do draw parallels with the field of hypnosis because advertising uses words and images in a way that is intended to influence your behaviour and even alter the way you live your life.it is therefore not surprising that many people consider advertising as mass hypnosis. Though we have these similarities, are they really the same? I mean, how does an image or idea on a written page, or on the television then affect our behaviour in such a way that it is comparable to clinical hypnosis? Especially when some of them are only a few seconds in length, or just a still frame image with a slogan.There is a belief held by some advertisers and hypnosis professionals alike, that believes the majority of people don’t actually engage their full attention with advertisement; that is, they wander off to other things while being exposed to the advertisement.There is a lot of evidence to suggest that subliminal messages do not influence us at all. However, much social psychological and cognitive research suggest messages may be absorbed, even when we are not giving it our full attention. The work of Sherman in 1998 and 2000, referred to this as “priming” whereby as a result of having been exposed to a product through the advertisement, we then recognise that product when we are out shopping and choose that product as a result.There are a wide number of studies that anyone can go and take a look at online that do show that the more familiar we are with a product or service, the more likely we are to buy it and consider to be a positive choice to make.In 1999, Aronson highlighted that repetition and familiarity are progressive ways of getting messages into peoples awareness.In clinical applications of hypnosis, we tend to know that repetition can be incredibly hypnotic and useful and we strive for a degree of trust and expectancy which is similar and has parallels with familiarity. So maybe there are parallels between these two topics of advertising and hypnosis, eh?I am tough to convince, so let’s look a bit further into this.There are estimates made by all kinds of experts about this, but in our day-to-day lives, we get bombarded by thousands (some think millions, others hundreds) of pieces of information ranging from obvious advertisements on telly or in magazines, to conversations we have with the people we encounter, to books we read and that is not even considering many other forms of information (as I type this, I have 5 windows open on my PC that are feeding me all kinds of data right now!).Every piece of information that reaches you, that you absorb, is surely influencing you in some way. Even our day dreams, our own internal dialogue, are influencing us in some shape or form.Within our hypnotherapy sessions with our clients, we often seek to influence those clients in a way that enables them to alter their behaviour, or change their experience of themselves in a way that helps them.Any kind of therapy, in particular talk therapies, usually involves wanting to help a client reach a more satisfying, happier place in their life, doesn’t it?We attempt to equip individuals with the skills to live in a way they find better.As hypnotherapists, how do we do that?What does a hypnotherapist says or do that influences the client in a beneficial way? Being able to progressively influence someone, is that something the hypnotherapist does to the client because of some inherent or innate gift or skill? I am sure many would suggest that the manner, skill and depth of knowledge of the hypnotherapist contribute to their ability to positively influence the client in a hypnosis session.Or is the influencing happening because of the receptive (or non-receptive) state of the client? There are many of us in the hypnotherapy field that appreciate the client derives more benefit is they are sufficiently motivated, open-minded, expectant and prepared to be responsible for their share of the hypnotherapy results.We can see that within advertising, suggestions are delivered. In hypnosis, we often consider our clients to be suggestible. Suggestibility can be seen as an ability to welcome new ideas, being prepared to learn new things and take on other perspectives, for example.So then as we take on new information, ideas and perspectives, depending on its relevancy and beneficial value to the individual, it may well affect a person’s experience anywhere from a little to a lot.Do you think that previous paragraph is about hypnosis or advertising?In a hypnotherapy session, the client is the person being influenced, and is therefore in some sense also suggestible. They have chosen to be there in some way and therefore are open to making changes, obtaining new perspectives, and affecting their experience in ways that are going to help them enjoy life more, or cope with better in some way.if you look at the work of Theodore Barber (1969) you’ll know that very few adults ever accept information without appraising it in some shape or form. So there is a great big difference between suggestibility and gullibility. Hypnosis does not render people gullible.Is the same sort of suggestibility present when we are subjected to advertising. I don’t really think so. We are open to new experience, or may dig our heels in, defend our other choices in opposition to the advertisement, for example. And though that can happen in therapy too, there is a difference.There are indeed a number of parallels between hypnosis and advertising. But advertising is not hypnosis. They share some principles and both hypnosis and advertising do learn a great deal from the other, but they are not the same thing. Ok, so we might use certain terms related to hypnosis to describe the effects of advertising from time to time, but when you look closer, you see how easy it is to distinguish one from the other.