"When business is good, it pays to advertise. When business is bad, you`ve got to advertise."

If you are in business, whether to sell a product, promote an event or let people know about a service you provide, nothing can more true.

The fact is you need to advertise, and studies have shown your advertising must appear somewhere between 5 and 7 times (on average) in front of your prospective customer in order to land a customer.

So what makes up a good advertisement, especially when it comes to doing so on the Internet? Neal Freeman of Ophthalmology Times writes, "Marketing planning is a broad-based procedure. Each of the four "P`s" of marketing (product, place, price, and promotion) must be considered." He is absolutely correct and for our purposes here in this article we are going to focus in on the last "P", promotion, or what most call advertising. There are three types of advertising styles we want to touch on today. Each one or all three can be very valuable when running your next advertisement.

In your advertising you want to be specific. An example of a specific objective would be: "We are offering a 20% discount on all of our widgets if purchased by December 1st." Freeman writes, "Determine what kind of response you seek in what target market in what period of time." That he says will help you better define your specifics.

If you advertising to inform a consumer or potential customer, keep in min advertising is to increase the primary demand or in other words to demand for the product or service you are offering. If a potential customer is informed about your service, chances are they will more than likely choose it from the provider of the information. So make sure your advertising is informative.

Another form of advertising is persuasive advertising. Persuasive advertising builds selective demand, i.e., demand for the service of one particular provider. With your advertising you are trying to persuade the customer that your product or service is the one they should go with.

The third type of advertising we will touch on today is reminder advertising. Reminder advertising is used for services that have been available for an extended period. If the community or customer base in your market already knows of you, then you want to advertise to just remind them that you are still out there, you still offer great services and/or products and so on. Nike is a company that is a good example of this.

The ultimate goal of most advertising programs is to build "top of mind" awareness of your services. Informative, persuasive, and reminder advertising combine to achieve this result. When the patient finally decides to obtain a service, you want to be the provider that comes to the top of the patients mind.