As you consider advertising options for your business, either in placing advertising or getting advertising from other businesses, hitting the right market segment always poses a problem. Traditional mass marketing approaches often focus general messages delivered to loosely focused market segments, such as morning radio listeners or evening TV viewers. Rather than aiming for these broad groups, some businesses turn to endemic advertising.
Endemic advertising works by placing, or allowing another business to place, advertising that appeals directly to the interests of customers. A cooking magazine, for example, makes a perfect advertising outlet for companies that make kitchen knives or cookware. The readers of a cooking magazine probably want to know about new, better or different products that can improve their cooking experience. Endemic advertising seeks to take advantage of these types of natural or common-sense markets.
Some businesses lend themselves to endemic advertising more easily than others. Magazines, for example, tend to target specific groups, which makes it easy to know if the readers provide a good choice for endemic advertising. Most businesses, though, can find avenues to take advantage of endemic marketing. A comics and gaming shop, for example, could purchase ad space on websites or in newsletters of local comic conventions or gaming tournaments. Moving in the other direction, an accountant might sell ad space on the business’ blog for bookkeeping software.
The main benefit of endemic advertising is that speaks directly to the interests of customers, which means the ad becomes part of the experience, rather than just being visual, textual or auditory noise to ignore. While not a hard and fast rule, the odds favor a higher conversion rate from simple ad viewer into paying customer. In terms of selling endemic ad space, however, if you run a successful business website, newsletter or blog in a niche, advertisers want to place ads with you. Even if you approach the business about purchasing ad space, the job of selling becomes significantly easier because of the obvious connection between their business and yours.
By nature, endemic advertising commands a limited reach. Where an endemic ad in a magazine might reach 50,000 readers, a well-placed TV ad might reach a million or more. By engaging in endemic advertising, the advertiser makes a conscious trade-off between reaching lots of customers of which at least some probably want a product and reaching a much smaller audience of which a much higher percentage probably do or will want a product.
