You should also consider how closely a local magazine parallels your core market. Most local businesses find their trade in their home or immediately adjacent towns. Many local magazines are distributed over a wide region—say, from fifty to one hundred towns. Carefully calculate what, if any, return you will get from advertising to a geographic base that is much broader than your typical trade reaches.

Specialty magazines
While the cost per thousand readers reached may be high for specialty magazines, they may offer the lowest cost per thousand qualified prospects. More readers of a specialty magazine are potential purchasers of your applicable specialized product or service than would be true of a general readership publication.

Specialty magazines tend to be thoroughly read, not scanned, and smaller ads often work well in these vehicles. Mail-order products, especially in narrow fields in which products are not readily available at the retail level, tend to net good results from specialty magazine advertising.

But there is a much less expensive, sometimes even free, advertising alternative. Find a mail-order company that is willing to purchase your product at discount and feature it in its catalog. Some of these outfits don’t charge you for space in their catalogs, and some do. Often, those catalog companies that do charge for “ad” space will allow you to pay for this space with free product at the wholesaler price instead of with cash.

Trade magazines
Like specialty magazines, trade magazines allow you to zero in on your target audience. Trade magazines tend to have smaller circulations and even lower advertising rates than specialty magazines.

You should run full-page ads in trade publications, however. Do this even if it means you need to reduce your ad frequency to meet your advertising budget, and even if can only afford one full-page ad per year. Readers of trade magazines don’t usually bother checking less than full-page ads even if they get caught up in carefully reading the editorial content. These readers know that only small start-up companies tend to buy small ad space and they aren’t interested in any risks involved in purchasing from a less than well-established firm. In fact, some companies even purchase double truck, or facing full pages, multiple page, cover gatefolds, or special insert ads that they have printed themselves in order to really impress the publication’s readers with their image and reputation.

Quality
No matter what magazine you decide to advertise in, readers expect magazine ads to be much slicker and more attractive than newspaper ads. And they expect the copy to read just as cleverly as a radio spot.

While you need to ensure that your ad is effective, it also must be visually appealing. Here is a suggestion that will help you judge what works and what doesn’t. Develop more than one ad design idea or concept. Place mock-ups of these ad concepts in an old copy of the magazine you plan to advertise in. What do you think? How do they compare as you flip through the publication? Which one really captures your attention? And, since you might not be the most impartial judge, it is important to ask other people what their opinion is.

Be leery of “bingo card” responses
Measure sales generated by your magazine ads, not inquiries. Many new magazine advertisers are impressed when they get hundreds or even thousands of inquiries from magazine readers who have circled the company’s name on readers’ service cards. While you should follow up on these inquiries, my experience has been that very, very few of these inquiries add up to sales. Readers often circle dozens of names on readers’ service cards when they actually have very little interest in the products.