Advertising

Let’s start with the simple stuff. If you are running advertising that is not working, please stop it!

This applies to you whether you’re running ads in newspapers, magazines, or on radio, television, billboards, posters, taxis or buses.

I know it sounds obvious but here’s what often happens: People run advertising because they feel they ought to. They’re not really sure if it’s working but they are hesitant to stop it because it may be one of their main forms of marketing.

By the end of this page you will have enough information to ensure that you are never in that position again. You will either be running great ads that produce great results, or you will be spending your marketing money elsewhere.

There are two types of advertising – direct response advertising and brand advertising.

Understanding the distinction between the two will immediately save you a fortune.

Brand advertising is used by companies like Coca Cola and the large car manufacturers to build and increase awareness of their brand. Unless you have huge amounts of money which you are happy to lose, you should avoid brand advertising at all costs. For a small business it is a complete waste of money.

The only type of advertising you ever want to consider is direct response advertising. The only purpose of direct response advertising is to produce a clear response.

The type of response may vary depending on the type of business you are in and your overall marketing strategy. You may want the response to be an immediate purchase. You may want the response to be for someone to contact you to ask for a brochure.

The great thing about direct response advertising is that you can instantly tell whether it is working.

It either produces a response or it doesn’t. One of the reasons that most small business advertising does not work is that it’s a combination of half hearted direct response and highly ineffective brand advertising.

Fortunately, you now know the difference. In the land of the small or medium business, direct response is King!

Finally, It is absolutely essential that you test and measure all of your advertising.

If we are going to engage in direct response advertising we obviously need to be able to measure that response, otherwise we are not going to know if the ad is working.

At the very least we need to know how many people responded, how many of them were converted to a sale and what that is worth to you. Then you need to compare that figure to the cost of the ad and you can immediately work out how profitable the ad was, or whether you should stop running it.

So many businesses just allocate a certain mount of money to an advertising budget, spend the money every year…and they’ve only got a vague sense of whether the ads are working are not. This is crazy. If your ads are working, you want to roll them out on a larger scale.

If they’re not, STOP and use the money on one of the dozens of other marketing strategies that can bring you a 100 or 200 or 300% return on your investments.

You will obviously need some sort of system for asking people who contact you for the first time where they heard about you. If you have a larger business, you may even want to set up a separate phone line with a number that only appears in your ad. If you’re directing people to a website, you may want to set up a special web page that also only appears in your ad.

This will ensure that you can clearly identify when people are responding to your advertising.