Be Smart

Be Smart.

You may have noticed there are a lot of advertisements in the world. Companies are always striving to be bigger and more noticeable than their neighbors, fighting for your attention and loyalty and money. And it seems like the advertisers themselves are coming up with more creative (read "annoying") ways to share logos and messages. Really-- ads over the urinals? Ads on the floor? Where will it end?

So to get your message out to the world, you have to figure out how to make it simple and be noticed. How do you advertise yourself to a thousand people? Ten thousand? A million? Aside from word of mouth (and who has that many friends?), a web site is probably the best choice. It's visible anywhere in the world, any time of day, and is available to anyone with access to some common technology.

Consider how much it would cost to do a television spot. We're not even talking about the Super Bowl spots or the thirty-second clips during the season premiere of Lost-- we're talking about an ad that runs on Thursday evening around 9:30 between an ad for soda and one for shampoo. It'll set you back tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. And after you've spent that, you lean back in your chair and smile... until you realize that you just bought thirty gosh darn seconds of airtime, and you're going to need to do it again next week. And the week after. And at different times of the day, on different networks, with different audiences.

Okay, so maybe a print advertisement will work instead. Drop it in a magazine... but which magazine? And if it's not a full-page ad, you just know it's going to end up tucked in a sidebar beneath an ad for a sleazy divorce lawyer. So maybe newspaper. But do you want to spend the bucks for the New York Times, or will you have to settle for the Podunk Idaho Press? Consider mailing postcards or full glossy letters to a thousand people, or ten thousand. And then consider what you do when you receive those things in the mailbox. That's right-- recycle.

It's not that there's anything inherently bad or wrong or useless about doing these things. But our point here is that the cost of any of them is pretty steep, and your exposure is surprisingly limited.

Now think about a web site. The web is always on-- always humming along waiting for people to come visit. So you don't need to worry about whether your target audience is a group of early risers or night owls. And you don't need to worry about whether they live in New York City or Podunk Idaho. All you need to worry about is how to best convey your message so they understand it and want to work with you. And, of course, the cost.

Web sites aren't necessarily cheap, but they're not prohibitively expensive either. And compared with a Super Bowl ad, they're an absolute steal. We have years upon years of experience building them, so we can do it quickly-- and our process is streamlined so we can take you through the steps from concept to design to implementation to launch. Your site can be ready to go, straight from the starting line, in just a few weeks. And you'll spend a fraction of what you might spend on television or newspaper or print, yet reach a potential audience of billions. Talk about a return on investment!

At Zing, our business is almost completely driven by referrals. The fact that we didn't bomb out in a year proves we must be doing something right. So think about the Super Bowl, and then call us. We'll save you a pile of dough that you can use for that vacation to Podunk.