Whenever I challenge marketers on why they advertise in the fashion they do I often hear the answer, “it’s for brand awareness”. Okay, I can respect that, IF you can tell me what brand awareness gets you? I get a lot of blank stares and rambling that goes in many different directions but no concrete answers. I’m still waiting for that answer so if you have one, please share it with me.

I understand the value of brand awareness, but that’s no excuse to put out and without a call to action, without any contact information, without any intention of measuring the responses to that ad. Brand awareness isn’t enough; you need to get more out of your advertisements if you are going to spend money on them. Brand awareness is powerful, but to achieve brand awareness by relying solely on advertising, that’s going to be one heck of an expensive endeavour.

Try a couple of these to improve the ROI of your advertising:

• Make ads very brief and clean, most if not all people don’t have patience for long, cluttered ads
• Don’t just let the ad die on the billboard, page, or screen. Be direct in what you want them to do next by incorporating a call to action
• Create a landing page for the call to action to measure the response rate
• Use an ad as a way to get people to sign up for something they want and start building a permission asset to develop into a larger overall marketing strategy
• Share something worth communicating. Don’t just place an ad because you feel you should. Do it with the purpose of communicating something worth while.