People have many different ideas on what the purpose of advertising is.

Some say it is to get noticed, get signups, or make sales, and while these are correct answers, I would like to suggest another, perhaps more important reason as to what the purpose of advertising is, and that is -

To get on your target prospect's shopping list.

Many years ago, long before they became famous, Knott's Berry Farm paid a ton of money to get billboards created that dotted the main freeways into Buena Park, southern Califonia.

These billboards said...

3 Things to do in Southern California.

1. Go to the beach.

2. Go to Disneyland

3. Go to Knott's Berry Farm.

They spent tens of thousands of dollars on these billboards, so it begs why they put themselves at the bottom instead of the top of the billboards?

The answer was surprisingly simple and extremely clever.

When people visited southern Califonia, they knew that a visit to Knott's Berry Farm would not be on their radar.

They came to go to the beach or Disneyland.

All Knott's Berry Farm had to do was to create a way to get on their prospect's shopping list, and what better shopping list to get on than one with the beach and Disneyworld on it.

Was this campaign successful?

You could say it was.

Since the 1940s, Knott's Berry Farm has grown into a 57-acre theme park located in Buena Park, California; in 2018, it was the 12th-most-visited theme park in North America. It averaged approximately 4 million visitors per year.

So advertising has 3 primary purposes, and each purpose requires a different approach.

Purpose 1 - Get signups and build a list. Here you offer a powerful incentive to encourage people to signup to your list. It needs to be exceptionally powerful because you are competing with hundreds of thousands of other lists.

Purpose 2 - Make sales, and you measure this by a sales to views ratio. How many times was your ad seen, and how many sales did you make?

Purpose 3 - Get on your prospect's shopping list, and to do that, you need to advertise everywhere you can, using every marketing method you can, and you need to write your ads, so they target the people you want as customers.

If you are new to the internet, you might want to start with some free advertising or buy a lifetime founder membership at a site like Profit From Free Ads, and after the initial membership fee, your advertising is free for life. You can join Profit From Free Ads here.

Phil Basten
JAM Marketing, Inc.