Top 5 Things to Know About Advertising in a Trade Journal

In the course of my real job I place ads in industrial trade publications to market my company's products and services. I thought it would be interesting to document some of the lessons I have learned placing these ads. As usual, I will employ a point form list to help me avoid having to write sentences that flow well. Writing is such a chore these days!

Top 5 Things to Know About Advertising in a Trade Journal

1. No one pays the list rate. For budgeting purposes, the list rate is fine (especially if you want to sandbag a budget proposal). In practice, when you ask the journal's sales manager for pricing, it will 98% of the time be lower than the list rate.
2. Get 2 ads ready. Tweaking ad content throughout the course of a campaign is fine, but most businesses benefit from repetition in marketing. You want readers to recognize your ads after a while. If you run a completely different ad every month, your campaign will not be as effective as it could be.
3. Say as little as possible. Convey one message. With all your might, resist the urge to list all your products or services. If you have a good vision for your business, you should be able to easily pick a central marketing message and go with it.
4. Avoid the weird ethereal stuff. Ads for an optical encoder that show a woman climbing a mountain are not effective. Ads for an optical encoder that show the product beside something (like a coin) to give the reader some sense of scale are effective. In contrast to consumer marketing where you sell the sizzle not the steak, industrial marketing should emphasize the steak over the sizzle. Still a little sizzle never hurts.
5. Let the editorial staff know everything! Develop a relationship with the editorial staff. It doesn't have to be much, but enough so that they at least recognize you when they see you. Send press releases about any significant event (major sales, new products, agreements, etc). Editorial coverage is worth (at least) 4 times the space it occupies in the magazine. So a little quarter page blurb about some new development at company X is equivalent to a full page ad.