Trade Publication Advertising

What your website cannot do: find prospects
before they find your competitors

The Internet has reduced but not eliminated trade publication advertising because websites have a major limitation: being electronic directories, they are used primarily by prospects who are looking for a source. And once prospects start searching, they are in complete control of the buying process. Your best hope is to be included on their bid list, which can hinge on whether your site ranked high enough on the search terms they were using.

Unlike websites, trade publications enable you to reach and influence prospects who are not yet searching for a source. So running your ad among technical editorial enables you to reach and influence prospects before they research your competitors. Working with a prospect early in the purchasing process can give you a jump on the competition, enable you to influence the job specification to your advantage, or to shut your competitors out of the bidding process entirely.

We therefore recommend a minimum ad program in publications most efficient at reaching your target audience(s), determined not only by your and our first-hand experience, but by dedicated media surveys we can

conduct for you. Over 95% accurate, these surveys can widen the gap between you and competitors, who often pick lower efficiency publications based on herd mentality, while overlooking a top efficiency medium you could dominate at low cost.

We recommend a regular schedule of placements, even if you need to reduce ad size or color, for two reasons:

1. When ads are spaced closely enough, each successive insertion builds upon the readers' memory of the prior insertion, continually increasing their average recall and recognition of your company. This yields far greater awareness, preference and return on investment — and drives more traffic to your website — than the same number of ads placed erratically.
2. Regularly spaced insertions also offset the inability of your sales force to be in front of your industry's most important specifiers most of the time. Since you cannot predict when the window of opportunity to make a sale opens or closes, placing ads on a regular basis maximizes the likelihood that a prospect sees your ad just before that window opens, or that your ad actually initiates the project, frequently to the exclusion of your competitors.