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“our goal is to get a client to the point where they have so much great marketing going on, they don’t need to advertise”
Advertising and Marketing
Marketing is a way of concentrating limited resources to generate opportunities that will increase sales. It involves planning a strategy that will determine who are, and how to reach, the customers that will purchase from your company. Many believe marketing to be costly and so deter from this very effective way of promoting their business. Instead theychose to advertise, which is one aspect of marketing. For many business owners the problems surface when they place a generic advert in the local paper thinking this will make a difference. Most marketing strategies are inexpensive, simple and effective. They are however, dependant on how much time a business owner is prepared to invest to see results.
Why Is Advertising Important?
People run advertising because they feel they ought to. They’re not really sure if it’s working but they are reluctant to stop it because it may be their only form of marketing. There are two types of advertising – direct response advertising and brand advertising. Brand advertising is used by companies to build and increase awareness of their brand i.e. Pepsi/Nike. 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 can choose the response you want. 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 so you can get their contact details to add to your mailing list. 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.
Testing and Measuring Your Advertising
It is absolutely essential that you test and measure all of your advertising. If you are going to engage in direct response advertising you obviously need to be able to measure that response, otherwise you are not going to know if the ad is working. At the very least you 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 amount 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. This will ensure that you can clearly identify when people are responding to your advertising.
Don’t Follow the Competition
One of the biggest mistakes people make is advertising in publications or on various forms of media (taxis, billboards, buses etc) just because their competitors are doing so. Don’t for a minute think that all your competitors are there because their ads are producing great results. They’re more likely to be there because everyone else is and most of them won’t have a clue whether their advertising is working or not.
What is with Marketing then?
Marketing in itself is immensely simple. It is a question of deciding who your next customers are going to be, working out how they will notice you and what you will offer them, then going for it.
Very Simply
You have something that can benefit other people, it’s just that they don’t know it yet...!
Marketing your business is not expensive to learn, it’s cheap to maintain and a 100% commitment to improving your business, lots of enthusiasm and hard work, will pay off.
For more great articles on marketing your business go here
Advertising and Marketing
Marketing is a way of concentrating limited resources to generate opportunities that will increase sales. It involves planning a strategy that will determine who are, and how to reach, the customers that will purchase from your company. Many believe marketing to be costly and so deter from this very effective way of promoting their business. Instead theychose to advertise, which is one aspect of marketing. For many business owners the problems surface when they place a generic advert in the local paper thinking this will make a difference. Most marketing strategies are inexpensive, simple and effective. They are however, dependant on how much time a business owner is prepared to invest to see results.
Why Is Advertising Important?
People run advertising because they feel they ought to. They’re not really sure if it’s working but they are reluctant to stop it because it may be their only form of marketing. There are two types of advertising – direct response advertising and brand advertising. Brand advertising is used by companies to build and increase awareness of their brand i.e. Pepsi/Nike. 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 can choose the response you want. 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 so you can get their contact details to add to your mailing list. 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.
Testing and Measuring Your Advertising
It is absolutely essential that you test and measure all of your advertising. If you are going to engage in direct response advertising you obviously need to be able to measure that response, otherwise you are not going to know if the ad is working. At the very least you 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 amount 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. This will ensure that you can clearly identify when people are responding to your advertising.
Don’t Follow the Competition
One of the biggest mistakes people make is advertising in publications or on various forms of media (taxis, billboards, buses etc) just because their competitors are doing so. Don’t for a minute think that all your competitors are there because their ads are producing great results. They’re more likely to be there because everyone else is and most of them won’t have a clue whether their advertising is working or not.
What is with Marketing then?
Marketing in itself is immensely simple. It is a question of deciding who your next customers are going to be, working out how they will notice you and what you will offer them, then going for it.
Very Simply
You have something that can benefit other people, it’s just that they don’t know it yet...!
Marketing your business is not expensive to learn, it’s cheap to maintain and a 100% commitment to improving your business, lots of enthusiasm and hard work, will pay off.
For more great articles on marketing your business go here
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