If we’ve learned nothing else from the Great Twinkie Incident of 2012 & 2013, this much is clear: you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. It’s funny how easy it is to take something for granted when it always seems to be available. It’s even more interesting how welcome the return of that item becomes.
Now, we’re not telling you to get those snack foods advertised with us (though we suppose you could, if you really wanted to), but we think there’s a nugget of very interesting information buried in this week’s highly touted Return of the Twinkie: sometimes it helps to take something away for a bit in order to get it really noticed. It worked for Hostess, and we’ve found that it sometimes works with cars, air conditioners & furniture, too. Sometimes a seller will decide to let an ad expire, wait a few weeks, and make the ad active again. And it often seems to help sell that item. We’re no psychologists, so we couldn’t get into the finer points of why such a strategy works, but it does (and with alarming frequency).
Feel free to take a page from those little cream-filled cakes: when it’s time for your ad to expire, let it. And re-advertise it a week or two later. We keep the information from expired ads on our system for up to three months, so there’s no need to rewrite the ad. Simply give us a ring when you’re ready to re-advertise.