Become a Household Name

Best selling author, entrepreneur, and agent of change Seth Godin blogged today about the importance of being a familiar name to your prospective customers and I couldn't agree more.

Being a familiar name takes you miles closer to closing a sale. People like to buy from companies they've heard of.

As a web entrepreneur that runs a hyper-local technology blog reliant on advertising revenue through banner ads, this is often a benefit I tout when dealing with sales objections. While click-through rates wallow across many industries and banner ad blindness has become a threat on many high traffic sites, Godin still believes there is immense value in brand-building awareness campaigns.

It turns out that this is an overlooked benefit of banner ads. Banner ads are fairly worthless in terms of generating clickthroughs... you have to trick too much and manipulate too much to get clicks worth much of anything. But, if you build ads with no intent of clicks, no hope for clicks... then you can focus on ads that drill your name or picture or phrase into my head. 100 impressions and you're almost famous.

Repetition breeds familiarity and eye-catching graphic banners ads still get noticed. So if you're breaking into a new market or just trying to remain relevant in your local scene, pick a couple sites serving your demographic and give banner advertising another chance. You're be surprised at just how easy it is to become a household name.