30-second radio advertisements can be just as impactful as a minute-long commercial.

shutterstock_133417934A powerful way to reach your consumers in your local area, and now even nationally, is through radio advertising. A 30 second advertisement may not seem like enough time to get a marketing message across but with the correct format, it can be a success. According to Steve Doctrow of Rogers & Cowan, radio allows you to create brand awareness as well as the ability to connect with a widespread audience.

Introduce Your Product

Immediately at the beginning of the commercial, introduce your product or service and explain its benefit to the consumer. For example, if your company is a limousine service, you could begin the advertisement with, “Do you need a professional limo service for your upcoming prom? XYZ company can help you out.” You’re identifying the need and also grabbing the listener’s attention and introducing a solution – which is your company. This helps the listener pay more attention to what message you’re trying to get across.

Call to Action and Reminder

After describing your product, you’re probably left with a good 10 seconds to close up your commercial. Close your ad with a call to action and a reminder of your service. Be sure to include contact information that’s easy to remember – think catchy phrases or even a jingle, anything to remind the consumer about your specific service or product. Because radio is prevalent on the road, your potential customers probably won’t be able to jot down your number but will instead have to memorize whatever contact information you leave behind in the last few seconds of the advertisement.


Given its focus on moving towards the Internet of Things, Amazon has acquired 2lemetry – a startup company in Denver that has developed a enterprise focused platform that tracks and manages IP-enabled machines and other devices.

Even though the terms of the deal have been finalized recently, they haven’t been disclosed yet. Despite the secrecy, an Amazon spokesperson said, “I can confirm that Amazon has acquired 2lemetry and we look forward to continuing to support 2lemetry customers.”

Some of these customers are Honeywell, First Mile and the Demeter energy group. Apart from this, nothing else was revealed by Amazon but it isn’t hard to guess that 2lemetry will become a part of AWS – which is that part of the business where Amazon has made moves in the enterprise IoT space.

However, this isn’t the first time an acquisition has been made in this space. Specifically, Amazon introduced Kinesis that analyzes high-volume data streams from a number of sources and in real-time as well. A number of people believe that with the addition of 2lemetry, this could enhance the functionality of that solution while also configuring it for machine-to-machine deployments.

2lemetry has been developing products that uses its platform in retail environments – technology that come in handy in “physical commerce” – an area where Amazon has been meaning to expand into.

Amazon also sells home automation hardware such as thermostats and smart locks apart from Echo – its very own home-assistant hardware – and in time, 2lemetry’s offerings might also find itself in a  customer-based service as well.


Mobile advertising is growing territory, and still open to disruption from the right strategy. There is a lot to be learned. If you set your campaigns to gather data that will be meaningful to you, you can take advantage of the hyper-targeted market segment that uses smartphones. These on-the-go users are highly motivated, often using smartphones to comparison shop. Here are some practical tips to help you personalize your messaging.

Fine Tuning Your Messaging

Targeting is slowly moving toward an era of predictive search, but we’re not quite there yet. We still have plenty of options to target users based on their interests and location. Targeting users by interest, for example, helps you tailor your message to a specific person.

Your messaging should be similar across the board, but you do not want to dilute your brand by following users around the Web. Be careful how frequently your ads are shown, and fine tune how often users will see your ads wherever possible. You will find this practice will lead you to opening more campaigns, and looking for other market segments to help you scale.

Tell the User What You Want Him to Do

Be explicit in your calls to action. The user’s time is valuable, and she will click away from a mobile ad just as quickly as a desktop one. Especially if that ad interrupts the browsing experience. Make sure your messaging is succinct, and that your ads do not interfere with the user’s experience. Test this experience by emulating your ads on a mobile device.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the CEO of engage:BDR, and an expert in the art of direct marketing. Ted Dhanik began working for MySpace.com, helping to launch that brand in the social media space. Today, Ted Dhanik helps businesses increase their audience through targeted banner advertising.


One of the most powerful assets available in the world of display advertising is the ability to target consumers. Advertisers can improve their sales pipeline by reducing the amount of disinterested consumers that are targeted by campaigns casting nets that are too wide.

Advertising is slowly moving toward prediction, where ads are served to consumers who are in the market but don’t yet realize it. We’re not there yet, but we have an immense amount of data to work through that can help us target consumer behavior.

Micro-Targeting

Consumer behavior is not easy to categorize. There are no standards that account for every individual’s actions, like we don’t all like apples or oranges. The closest we can get is to categorize consumers by groups, taking what we know about individual desires and using that to reach out to wider arrays of consumers.

When we buy banner advertising space from ad exchanges, we are using search terms to help define consumer interest. We also target by location, and look for consistencies in gender and professional life. We may try to target specific industries, or an entire group of people like “moms in their 30s”.

When you buy from ad exchanges, you are buying from sources that have an audience that matches what you’re targeting. It cannot account for individual behavior, yet, but they have done most of the legwork involved in targeting for you. You need to utilize your own market data to help drive this traffic in the right direction, but buying your traffic from these platforms is an excellent method to target consumers based on the behaviors that define them.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the co-founder of engage:BDR, and is an active accelerator in the Los Angeles startup scene. Ted Dhanik has more than ten years of experience launching brands with display advertising. Contact Ted Dhanik through engage:BDR.


Google Analytics offers several tools to assist marketers by tracking what users do during a session. Savvy marketers are able to narrow down where their users come from, what pages they visit and how their efforts have improved over time. These functions will become a part of your daily Analytics routine. Learn to interpret this data and you will see improvements to your display advertising campaigns.

Assign a Value to Goals

Assigning a value to the goals on your page basically puts a dollar amount on your visits. You can use a little math to figure out how much each session cost you, based on the dollar amount you received from a completed goal. You can also see what each lost lead costs you, and develop a clearer picture of where those leads leave your goal funnel.

Review Top Converting Pages

Each session involves a user visiting a certain URL. When you set goals, Analytics tracks your goal from the first step in the funnel to the place where the goal code is placed. If you don’t place this code on the first page the user visits, you will only see what happened after the user started your form. Analytics can track where users go on your website, and provide a simple list of which URLs are most active. You can retrace the steps of your goals to determine which of your landing pages are most effective.

Compare History

Analytics keeps a detailed record of all sessions that occur on the pages you have chosen to track, and this data stays with your profile. Use it to compare how your campaigns have performed in the past, and formulate theories on how to scale.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the co-founder of engage:BDR, and an expert in lead generation and business development. Ted Dhanik has over fifteen years of experience selling advertising space for websites like LowerMyBills.com and MySpace.com. Read free tips on Internet marketing from the blog of Ted Dhanik, or from engage:BDR.