When you read that headline, I’m willing to bet that many of you instantly got an image in your head of that guy in the Verizon commercials, testing his cell phone reception. You really have to admire the genius of their advertising department for what they’ve managed to achieve with this particular ad campaign.
Let’s take a moment to look at 2 strategies they’ve implemented and how they can relate to your online businness.
- They’ve created a spokesperson or mascot that we instantly associate with their product.
- They’ve created a mental association linking a common phrase uttered by cell phone users to their product.
All of this fits under the label of branding. I cannot stress enough how powerful effective branding can be for your business. Look at any multi-billion dollar company in the world today and I guarantee you will see heavy branding incorporated into their advertising efforts.
So what can we learn from these highly successful comapanies? What do they know about branding that we can incorporate into our own advertising?
The power of repeated exposure
It’s quite obvious that the ad department at Geico auto insurance saw the value in pounding their british gecko’s image into our heads eh? Do you recall when they first debuted their gecko campaign? The little guy spoke only 2 words… “well hello”. By the end of the month we all recognized that gecko even if we weren’t quite sure what he was trying to sell us. In fact, I don’t think the folks at Geico intended to do anything other than branding their mascot at this stage of their campaign.
We can duplicate this strategy quite successfully with traffic exchange marketing. A splash page, branded with your
image,logo or name, in constant rotation in several high traffic exchanges can achieve a similar effect. If you’ve been surfing the exchanges lately, I’ll bet you recognize paul kinder’s face when you see it eh?
List building
I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who makes better use of list building than the pizza delivery industry.
When you order a large pepperoni, delivered to your door, Your address is instantly added to that pizza shop’s mailing list and you’ll soon find their advertisements in your mailbox. Usually right when you get home, hungry after a hard days work.
Add on opt-in form to the page you’re advertising, and you’ve now combined 2 powerful marketing strategies into your advertising. This is really all you should be focusing on when utilizing Traffic exchanges anyway. I mean, do you really expect to close a sale in 10-30 seconds? It’s doubtful. Instead, concentrate on branding yourself, and building your mailing list. Then you can build a relationship with your list. If you take a patient approach, and stay honest. You won’t have to do much “selling” at all.
In the coming weeks, I will be adding a bunch of step by step instructions to help you accomplish these tasks using your own custom built pages, however if you’re in a hurry to get started right away, I can point you toward an excellent set of free tools to give you a jump-start.
Head over to Affiliate Funnel and grab a free membership. You’ll get a quick loading splash/lead capture page which will help you to build your own mailing list, while branding your image in the exchanges. Once inside, You’ll find several other benefits included in your free membership as well.
Remember, the effects of branding don’t happen overnight. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can reap the rewards. Best of luck to you!