Benefits of Classified Ads for Businesses

Advertising with 60+Club’s online Business Classifieds

Reach more

• Generate more leads and grow your business by through our Over+60s audience
• Get more eyeballs daily. Our online classifieds will be promoted regularly via our website, newsletters and social media channels.
• Direct your prospects to your website, enquiry form or PDF by hyperlinking your ad.
• Greater flexibility of ad offerings with text-only, image-only and optional background colours.
• Increase your websites search engine rank by benefiting from our website backlinking to yours.
• Having your ad on our classifieds will help you rank on google at al.
• Text-only ads will provide SEO based on text crawling and by link referral.
• Image-only ads are provided with image title description to ensure it is crawled and link referral.
• Enjoy wider exposure across our online channels. Your ad will be promoted:
• monthly newsletter “Classifieds” section
• permanent position on our homepage footer
• positioned beside our Personal Connections Classifieds Ads portal (launching in October)
• regular mentions in our Facebook posts
• Enabling smaller businesses to reach their audience on a small budget, with a wider reach.

Benefits of Classified Ads

Although people can be mistaken about the value of classifieds, this is not to suggest that classifieds are without limitations. The truth is, because of the size of the ad, it does carry a number of built-in limitations, so to speak. For instance: It does not allow for photos; it is not suitable for detailed copy; it is surrounded by a mass of other ads; it doesn’t provide space for demonstrating the benefits of a product; it doesn’t allow space for testimonials, etc.

While all of these issues may rightly be a concern, it is useful to remember that classifieds have advantages that should not be ignored.

Classifieds are inexpensive
This is perhaps the biggest advantage of using this form of advertising. Payment is generally based on the number of words or the lines of copy used in the ad. Given the low cost, you can actually run an entire series of classifieds for the price of one full-page ad. The inexpensive nature of the ad means you can reach out to your prospects on a regular basis without breaking your bank account.

Classifieds are great for low-cost testing
If you wanted to test various elements of a large display ad, it would indeed be costly. The reason is obvious: Each time you test, you’d have to pay for the space of the whole ad. On the other hand, classifieds allow you to inexpensively test copy throughout a series-and at the cost of a single large display ad.

Classifieds are ideal for testing new concepts
Whenever copywriter Ted Nicholas was brainstorming for a new book title, he used to narrow his list of ideas down to a few titles. Then he would run classifieds and use the titles as headlines for each ad. The ad that pulled the biggest response would provide him with the winning title for his new book.

Classifieds are great for generating leads
The two-step approach means that you make an offer in your ad that prompts the reader to make contact with you. You invite them to contact you by phone, email, website or webform etc. When the contact is made, you simply follow-up with their preferred method. This allows you to grow your database of prospects and customers. Once you have their information, you can stay in touch with them by sending regular content or an email touching base.

Classifieds help small to medium business compete
It’s been said that the classifieds is the one tool that allows the little guy (or gal) to be more competitive. It enables smaller businesses to reach their audience on a small budget, no matter where they live.

Tips on Creating a Classified Ad

When deciding what key verbiage you should include in your classified ad campaign, debating what can be left out to cut costs, and what must-have information to include, it’s important to start with the basics to help you define what is a “must-see” versus what is a distraction. When you are creating a classified ad here is what to include and what to leave out.

A great headline
A headline specifically is the phrasing that allows the reader to know what your classified ad is about. Your headline may be the only thing that someone reads so it is important that it captures who you are trying to reach, and why they should keep reading your ad.

Benefits
In a perfect world, everyone would know why doing business with you is the bees knees. In advertising, it is important to make sure that your audience can distinguish right away why they should do business with you over some other provider. The key portion of your ad is letting them know not only some of the standard benefits or “solutions” that you can provide for their “problems” but also what makes you stand out from your competition.

Call to action and Fear of Loss
Lastly, you want to make sure that your reader understands what they need to do and the time frame that they need to follow through to receive your offer. Fear of loss provides a powerful incentive into making sure that your audience contacts you right away instead of storing it in the cobwebs of their memory bank for a rainy day.

Contact info
While sometimes people prefer to offer multiple ways for a customer to reach out, in some cases, it can actually be more beneficial to provide them with one way to contact you. For instance, some may be distracted by multiple contact methods and end up putting it off until later, in other cases it can make ads harder to track by offering too many modes of contact.

In order to determine what method of contact is best for you (phone, email or website) it is important to define the ultimate goal of your campaign when creating a classified ad. As in, are you looking to drive people to your website, store, or do you want them to call? Once you have established what that is everything else will begin to fall into place.