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Advertising needs an Audience, It is Just Plain Economics If you are in business and advertising now, like you did before, you may be like that person winking at a pretty girl in the dark, your intentions may be good but you are in the wrong space It has been normal practice in New Zealand for businesses big and small in the last 100 years to use the Mass Media for advertising purposes. The Mass Media being Print, Radio and Television, the advertising process akin to a shotgun, blast it everywhere and hope something sticks But the development of the Internet and latterly the Web enabled business to reach customers in a different manner. Businesses could target their advertising at the person interested But how many people in business when they use the Web, think to use the Internet / Web correctly as a business tool to advise their business offerings True, many businesses have a website but studies going back as far as 2002 and observations today confirm that a least 80% of the sites in New Zealand still do not meet the needs of the customer. The prime example being that the websites cannot be found by the word (s) or phrases a potential customer types in to a search engine search box Whereas advertising in the Mass media is characterized by the phrase, "businesses looking for customers", on the Web it is "customers looking for the business" And this statement requires a shift in the consciousness of the advertiser To fix the website may require no more than putting in place correctly constructed Title tags and Meta description tags and dropping out the words in the keyword tags But a bigger fix is to acknowledge that the world in which we all advertise is changing What was usual or normal yesterday is gone; your customers are not where you think or where you were told they are Fewer and fewer people each year use the back of a telephone book to find information, they prefer to use the Web, TARPS and Rating points are being rendered meaningless with the introduction of new technologies And now we have the Social Media, people on-line interacting with each other yet many businesses, to quote Hitwise "have yet to understand the opportunity and accept the challenge of direct interaction" A changing world requires a change in the marketing strategies of business Advertising is a necessity in the operation of a successful business but to succeed advertising needs an audience and the audience has moved We are living through one of the greatest sociological events in history and these changes may even include the demise of the newspaper. The news, the journalism will not die, it is already migrating on-line and why wait for a newspaper when the information about the businesses offerings can be found immediately on-line Already in the UK, the Guardian newspaper reports 60 newspapers closed. The USA , the Wall Street Journal has an extensive list of newspaper closures and cutbacks For a business to succeed they must command an audience and if that audience is obtained by advertising, then the business must go where the customers are, this just plain economics What was usual or normal yesterday is gone. Are you ready? Contact Firstsearch