Is Your Advertising Bringing In More Customers…Or Are You Burning Through Cash Month After Month With Little Results To Show For It…
If your small business advertisements should be doing a lot better here’s a few little tips that will make BIG improvements to your marketing campaign.
Business owners often burn through cash in the never ending quest of “getting their name out there”… Unfortunately this is not the way to build a small business. There are distinct differences in the way large corporations with large budgets can afford to conduct marketing and the way a small business, with limited funds must market themselves to ensure profitability. As a small business, you need to have the assurance that when you spend money on advertising you are using methods that generate leads and sales that will help grow and sustain your business.
Download our Tip-sheet for Creating Better Ads
You may have thought that placing an ad or a flyer in the local newspaper was sufficient enough, until you tried it many times and have been disappointed. To make your advertising more effective I’m providing this checklist of Ad Rules that should be obeyed in your advertisements for maximum results.
- Talk to the Right Audience: One of the key ingredients of advertising and marketing is placing your adverting in front of the right audience. This may seem obvious but many business owners will place an advertisement in a newsletter or magazine that does not target the right audience for their business, or they will place an ad that doesn’t have a headline to draw the attention of their target customer. Instead of finding the right target they just pay more money for multiple runs hoping they will generate a lead by “getting their name out there” (whatever that means). Whenever you send an ad you want to send it to the right audience.The right audience has 3 main criteria – a) they want/need what you sell, b) they can afford what you sell, c) willing to pay the price for what you sell. If any of these are not present you will not have a good return on your ad spend.
- Make an Offer: The next major reason why your ad may not yield massive results is because there is no offer in the advertisements. Too many small business owners make an ad that doesn’t have an offer. They just show a picture, a logo and a clever tagline or slogan, and assume that a prospect will see your logo and a picture then make a call or a purchase. Do you do that? Of course not, you are a better shopper then that… and so are your customers. You must give a reason or an offer to get your prospects to come in, call or visit your website. You may be asking what kinds of offers can you make? You can offer a new product, free consultations, white papers, demo/trials, schedule an appointment, discounts, bonuses, etc let your imagination go wild. Each time you place an ad you have an opportunity to capture a persons attention, but once you get it you must give the audience something to respond too.
- Measure its Activity: When asked, “How effective was your last marketing campaign?” Business owners will say things like, “it was okay” or “it was terrible”, but when asked what that means many cannot tell you exactly how many calls or visits can in as a response to an ad. If you cannot link customers or revenue to an ad campaign should you run it again? Probably not, yet many will small business owners will run an ad that doesn’t work over and over and complain about the results. All advertising campaigns must be tracked, and each marketing piece must earn its way by producing cash an results.
These three “Ad Rules” will greatly improve your success and ROI on your small business advertising materials, if you are interested in creating better advertisements or having me critique your next advertisements to help boost your response, check out our direct response services on the contact page or message me on www.facebook.com/fullestextentmedia