Suggestions for Advertising & Promotion

[Omni]

This seems like kind of an unorthodox thread on an alt media forum, however I just thought other people would like to know what I have figured out if they happen to be into buying some form of advertisements.

I am no promotion or advertising guru. In fact I know very little about it. But this is what I found out:

Facebook ads are actually incredibly good if you have a right demographic in their advertising system to list under.

Twitter ads are incredibly terrible, and a complete waste of money.

Youtube ads are incredibly cheap, but in my experiences you get much less genuine interest in videos you advertise on youtube in comparison to traditional sharing/etc.


If anyone has ever advertised with infowars or davidicke.com I would be interested to hear your results. I am also very open to any advice on better advertising platforms for alternative streams of information. Also feel free to post any additional advertising and promotion advice in this thread.

(I am not condoning giving money to facebook or google)

[betoobig]

Hello Omni, main thing on advertising is what you want to sale (bullit) and identify very well your target, advertising is the shoot itself. So i will ask you, what you want to sale?
Now, i really think alternative news(news, health, etc), healling, meditations, and all the kind of stuff evolved(awaken) beings, or starting to evolve(awake) beings, dont need any advertising but mouth to mouth, or they(us) just simply found it. What i mean is that this kind of stuff atracks your target like a magnet thus the shoot is not need it.
Anyway, if you are interested in be given any advise you should provide more info about what you want to sale.
Have a great day and much love

[Omni]

Posted by betoobig (here)
Hello Omni, main thing on advertising is what you want to sale (bullit) and identify very well your target, advertising is the shoot itself. So i will ask you, what you want to sale?
Now, i really think alternative news(news, health, etc), healling, meditations, and all the kind of stuff evolved(awaken) beings, or starting to evolve(awake) beings, dont need any advertising but mouth to mouth, or they(us) just simply found it. What i mean is that this kind of stuff atracks your target like a magnet thus the shoot is not need it.
Anyway, if you are interested in be given any advise you should provide more info about what you want to sale.
Have a great day and much love

Well I'm not trying to sell anything right now. I'm trying to connect people with my work. Eventually I will be selling my book, but the ads wont be for profit as I don't think that is feasible. It is to get the truth out.

[Cara]

Hello @Omnisense and other Avalonians,

I used to work in strategic marketing and communications for a multi-national IT company. Here are my thoughts based on that experience.

My main thought is that with advertising, unless people are already "tuned-in" to the thing you wanted to promote, they are not readily influenced into taking any real action by the advertising. What I mean by tuned-in is that they need to already have an interest in the category you are promoting. When a potential buyer is not "tuned-in", there may be other effects created by advertising, but not necessarily purchase/buying action.

AIDA
There are lots of different marketing/advertising formulas but one of the most well known ones is AIDA: Awareness - Interest - Desire - Action.

Essentially the idea is to move the potential "buyer" through the stages from Awareness towards Action. i.e. They go from

• being aware of the "product",
• to being interested in it,
• to thinking they might benefit from it in some way,
• to buying it.

The "product" can be an actual product or something like making an appointment with a sales person, subscribing to a channel, downloading a document, etc.

When we devised promotional strategies, we were looking at different goals according to the stage of the scale - AIDA - and then mapping different advertising channels and promotional strategies to that to achieve our goals.

For example, PR was typically seen as an "air-cover" strategy that we used to create awareness. Live events were seen as Interest or Desire generating, and so we would typically pitch them to buyers who were already aware of the product. Promotional giveaways (such as coupons, bundling, discounts etc.) are mostly strategies to get buyers from desire to action, though they can do more if well done.

Twitter
Since Twitter could be classed as a kind of newsy social media channel, it might be appropriate to see it as a PR channel. The implication of this is that you might create Awareness using Twitter, but are unlikely to be able to move buyers all the way through to Action. Hence, you might infer that it is not really "working". We often had problems motivating for PR budget as it is difficult to prove return on investment for "air cover" awareness. So, I am not surprised to see your experience of Twitter as not very effective for "sales".

Facebook
I can imagine that since Facebook algorithms work very hard to have their users define their own interests, that Facebook would be very effective at targetting people who pre- and self-select for the "product" you are promoting. So, you are skipping over Awareness and Interest all the way to Desire and Action by advertising on Facebook if you get your target groups right.

Youtube
I don't know much about Youtube adverts since they were not so prevalent when I worked in marketing and communications but, as a user, I skip over every single one. So, unless you can create something that is entertaining or attention grabbing in the 3 seconds of mandatory play before users skip, I don't imagine they are very effective.

My "classification" of Youtube as a marketing channel is that it is by and large an entertainment channel (this is not to deny the many detailed, informative videos there). Hence to be heard on Youtube, you need to be entertaining in some way, something along the lines of how movie house adverts are often made to be entertaining.

Buyer Cycle Stages
Another way to think about this is to consider is where the buyer might be in their own "buying cycle":

• are they doing initial, entry-level research?
• are they doing a detailed kind of "due diligence" research on something?
• are they looking to purchase/take action online?
• have they already purchased/taken action and are now looking for further validation/more information? (Sometimes buyers do additional research after "purchase" to help with any cognitive dissonance they might be experiencing if the product turns out to be different to their expectations.)
• and more....

Depending on buyer cycle stage, different channels might be more effective.

Google Ads
We used to find Google ads very effective to sell things that were simple - e.g. book an appointment with a sales person, sign-up for a white paper, etc. but pretty useless for anything complicated where the buyer needed to do lots of research and due diligence. In this latter case, they were only useful to create Awareness and Interest.


Anyway - apologies for the marketing lecture. Other marketers might have different opinions and experience... marketing is not really a "science"... in my opinion, it's more a set of practices and tools that are shown to work through experience.

If anyone wants more info, please PM me.

[betoobig]

Just perfect Searcher, i agree with you FB may be the more interesting site for omni, as there are many groups who will appreciate Omni´s work, and are hungry for the truth, plus people shares really reach far out. Ubuntu comunity is very large by now and most of people there are awakened ones, and there are groups from all over the world.
I also think that truth, Mediations or healling are things that atrackt people like a magnet, in this times. People just find you, i know this may sound silly, but look at how we all found Avalon, it happened, it is not advertised anywhere and here we are.
Omni do trust you are doing and taking the right steps.
Much love

[Omni]

Posted by Searcher (here)
Hello @Omnisense and other Avalonians,

Greetings, thank you Searcher for your in depth reply. It helped. I have a couple clairifications though.

Twitter
Since Twitter could be classed as a kind of newsy social media channel, it might be appropriate to see it as a PR channel. The implication of this is that you might create Awareness using Twitter, but are unlikely to be able to move buyers all the way through to Action. Hence, you might infer that it is not really "working". We often had problems motivating for PR budget as it is difficult to prove return on investment for "air cover" awareness. So, I am not surprised to see your experience of Twitter as not very effective for "sales".

I wasn't trying to sell anything when I used twitter. I spent a little money to see how effective it is and to get the truth out. What I meant by twitter being bad is that it costs way too much for very little gain. For example my 3,000 followers on twitter would cost me like $7,000+ to get if it was all done by twitter advertising. Last I checked they charged about $2-$3 per follower, and way too much per engagement. It might be (very rough estimate) something like 50 cents per engagement, and many of the engagements are completely useless (like people looking if there are any comments). Facebook ads gave me about 14 cents per engagement, and the engagements were really quality engagements. Shares, page likes, that sort of thing.

I forget exactly how much I spent on twitter, maybe $10-$15. Got next to nothing. That same money on facebook will give a good bit of useful engagements.

So that is what I meant by twitter being terrible. Overall it's just a very pricey thing for very little return. I plan on advertising my book with about $10-$20 a month on facebook, but even if nobody buys the book, i will be getting page likes and increasing awareness just with the images going out, so that is acceptable.

Youtube
I don't know much about Youtube adverts since they were not so prevalent when I worked in marketing and communications but, as a user, I skip over every single one. So, unless you can create something that is entertaining or attention grabbing in the 3 seconds of mandatory play before users skip, I don't imagine they are very effective.

I always disable that type of advertising when using youtube. The type of advertising I do is to generate views and watch time on videos. It is the ad option to display your video like most other free videos on the right hand panel, or on searches.

I paid about $75 of free coupon code advertising and got about 6,000 views of a video. The bad thing was the average duration of those views was about 45 seconds, and the average duration of my total views is about 9+ minutes (including the advertised video with 6K views).

So in essence I would say facebook is the only viable option for me right now.

The rest of your post was really excellent and exactly what I was looking for, much thanks for that.

[Cara]

Thanks @Omnisense for the additional info.

Having seen your posts on Avalon before, I did assume that you're not actually selling a product, but rather wanting to get people to view your information and research. Some of the principles of selling may still be useful to consider since you are trying to get people to spend time, rather than money, which for some people is more precious.

I did not know you had a book - that must have been a lot of work. Do many people buy it after watching your videos or reading your website? You give a lot of information for free in those.

The Twitter prices you share sound outrageously high! No wonder they are struggling to manage their business from a financial perspective.

The metrics you shared on YouTube are interesting. 45 seconds versus 9 minutes is a vast difference. It leads me conclude that YouTube is becoming more and more like traditional TV where you have only a 30seconds to a minute to get someone's attention... I agree with your conclusion here - it seems expensive given that you have information and content to share that people need to take a little time over... Not just 45 seconds.

[Omni]

Posted by Searcher (here)
Thanks @Omnisense for the additional info.

Having seen your posts on Avalon before, I did assume that you're not actually selling a product, but rather wanting to get people to view your information and research. Some of the principles of selling may still be useful to consider since you are trying to get people to spend time, rather than money, which for some people is more precious.

I did not know you had a book - that must have been a lot of work. Do many people buy it after watching your videos or reading your website? You give a lot of information for free in those.

The Twitter prices you share sound outrageously high! No wonder they are struggling to manage their business from a financial perspective.

The metrics you shared on YouTube are interesting. 45 seconds versus 9 minutes is a vast difference. It leads me conclude that YouTube is becoming more and more like traditional TV where you have only a 30seconds to a minute to get someone's attention... I agree with your conclusion here - it seems expensive given that you have information and content to share that people need to take a little time over... Not just 45 seconds.

My book is not published yet. So as of right now (and for the last approximately 6+ years of producing alt media content) all my information is free. I will also send anyone who asks me via email a free PDF copy of my book once finished, so i guess everything will remain free, with an exception of physical copies of my book.

Here is the book cover:

[TargeT]

Posted by Omniverse (here)
This seems like kind of an unorthodox thread on an alt media forum, however I just thought other people would like to know what I have figured out if they happen to be into buying some form of advertisements.

I am no promotion or advertising guru. In fact I know very little about it. But this is what I found out:

Ditto, but I do know this:

TargeTing your market (& where/how your market consumes media) seems to be all that matters.

I mostly pay to advertise locally I haven't ventured into any of the large Ad. structures like google/facebook yet. Instead we use free (or mostly free) venues (Facebook page, Product focused review site entries which were obviously tourism/travel based for our business, a youtube page (kind of difficult to find the time to produce content), and we gave time to any media outlet that would cover us.


We've had great success through mostly free & low cost advertising, but our target audience is generally self motivated & looking for something like we offer already, so we just have to get our info out to the right places.

We generate a lot of our own content via facebook & regular updates, plus keeping our name "out there" via events etc.. has also been very beneficial & low cost (some of the events can be more expensive, but generally it's recovered).

I started a thread to sort of keep track of what we were doing a while back & of course I haven't updated it lately (though there's not much change really, still trying to feel out our customer load; we have only tracked about 1.5 years worth so far).

Posted by Omniverse (here)
I forget exactly how much I spent on twitter, maybe $10-$15. Got next to nothing. That same money on facebook will give a good bit of useful engagements.

So that is what I meant by twitter being terrible. Overall it's just a very pricey thing for very little return. I plan on advertising my book with about $10-$20 a month on facebook, but even if nobody buys the book, i will be getting page likes and increasing awareness just with the images going out, so that is acceptable.

I found twitter to be useless as well, I don't bother with it.