19 Jan

4 Tips For Making Effective Craigslist Ads

Posted in Synergy Suggestions on 19.01.15 by John Meloche

female hand with computer mouseIn a world where everyone seems to be flocking to the internet in order to get their news, entertainment and do their shopping, it certainly pays to advertise your business online. Last week, the Synergy Marketing Blog was dedicated to this concept as we looked extensively into some creative ways to use the social media giants Facebook and Twitter to adequately spread the word about your brand.

This week, we take a look at the whole online marketing phenomenon in a bit of a different way. Not considered a social media platform, Craigslist has become one of today’s most popular ways to buy and sell items over the internet. And naturally, it has become an excellent, free source of advertising for business owners all over the world. Synergy Marketing, by the way, is no exception. We post a new Craigslist ad about our promo gifts on a daily basis.

Servicing business owners all over Canada means that it’s important for us to be communicating with entrepreneurs throughout our great country. Craigslist offers us the opportunity to post ads in cities where we are not located physically, but can still provide our products to. Do you post ads on Craigslist? On Entrepreneur.com, Shanon Lewis informs us that “founded in 1996 by Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org gets an estimated 10 million unique visitors per day.”

So does it pay to advertise using this medium? Lewis sure thinks so. “With an online classified ads format organized by either region or city, Craigslist connects buyers and sellers in more than 300 communities; for the most part, posting on the site is free,” she writes. She goes on to list a number of techniques that people can use to adequately market their businesses on Craigslist. Here are four of her best tips.

1. Identify your market. Who are you selling to? Who is most likely to make use of what you have to offer? Answering questions such as these is the first step to using Craigslist the right way. “To start, you need to determine which city or cities you’re going to post an ad,” Lewis advises, “If you’re a service provider, you can identify available cities on Craigslist that encompass your service region.”

2. Create unique ads. Lewis goes on to inform that there are particular rules to follow when posting on Craigslist. We learned this early since we advertise our business all across Canada. Craigslist does not support posting the exact same ad over and over again. So it’s important to continually create new and original postings in order to be able to reach customers in various regions throughout the country. “Never post the exact same ad within 48 hours,” she warns.

3. Add photos to your ads. Craigslist allows users the opportunity to include photos of whatever it is they are advertising. In Synergy Marketing’s ads, we include a number of pictures of our promotional products to enhance each posting. This helps for the ads to get better noticed. “Ads with images only increase ad effectiveness,” Lewis informs us, “And adding images to your ad isn’t difficult. If you’re not web savvy, use the ‘upload image’ function available during the posting process.”

4. Track your results. You’ll only know how effective your Craigslist marketing campaign is if you pay attention to their results. “If you plan to post in multiple cities and offer specific promotions, tracking which ads produce the best results is important,” writes Lewis, “You can track a Craigslist ad by e-mail, phone number or website referral…How you choose to track should depend on your industry and the typical methods customer use to communicate with you.”

Each of our ads include our contact information, of course. And our blogs generally do the same. So give us a call at 1-877-748-9884 to learn more about the fantastic promo gifts we have available for you!

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