Advertising – A roll of the dice?

• provide basic facts about your business
• inform people about your product or service
• provide an opportunity to do a special promotion
• be used as part of a recruitment advert

It is important that you clearly target who your customers are e.g. national, local or both?

You can advertise in a wide range of different media which can help to reinforce the message you are trying to communicate. It's particular form can be anything from your shop sign or a postcard in the post office to an advert in a trade magazine or a 30-second radio slot.

Advertisments can be a potentially superb way of growing your sales.

So, the important thing in choosing this option is to make sure that you get the best results. If you do it well and test and experiment, it can become a highly profitable element of your marketing mix.

So here are some simple guidelines:

• Don’t jump straight in!
  There are many other more cost effective ways to market. It can be a very expensive option. Too many businesses get the advertising habit and then become addicted regardless of the poor results they may be getting. So, look at other methods of marketing first which will provide better results and help keep your costs under control.

• STOP paying for adverts that don’t bring business in
  I know it sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many people are running adverts just because that's what their business has always done.

• Test and Measure
  You won’t know whether the adverts are working unless you test and measure all of your advertising. So many businesses just allocate a certain amount of money to the marketing budget, spend the money every year…and they've only got a vague sense of whether the adverts are working or not.

  This is madness. You must be SMART about what you do.
  

  If your adverts are working then 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.

• Run adverts that will produce a response.
  Smart marketers are ruthless in only creating and paying for adverts that produce a profitable response.

• The most important element is the headline.
  The headline needs to really grab peoples' attention. One change in a headline can produce a 50 -100% increase in response.
  (TOP TIP: If the headline of your advert is currently the name of your company, you can almost certainly increase the response rate by changing the headline.)

• The copy of your advert needs to be a personal communication to the individual reading it.
  And it needs to be about them. It needs to address their needs, desires and fears and it needs to constantly communicate the benefits of what you are offering. At the end of the advert you need a call to action. Tell people exactly what they need to do to follow through and make it easy for them to do so.

Some simple Do's and DON'TS!! of advertising:

Don’t follow your competitors
One of the biggest mistakes people make is to promote themselves in publications just because their competitors are in them. Don't for a minute think that all your competitors are there because their adverts 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 adverts are working. The only criteria for advertising anywhere is if the advert produces great results for you.

Remember to be SMART
You should anticipate a profitable return on all your marketing activity. So make sure that you measure the success of each advert you place. This can easily be done by including a unique refrence on the advert which you ask people to quote when contacting you.

It pays to ask new customers how they came across you when you first meet or make contact.

Don't be lazy, make sure you keep a record of new sales generated!

If it works - do it AGAIN and AGAIN!!
If you find a method of advertsing that works for you then don't hold back - make sure that you repeat it. But one word of caution, don't just fall into a habit and avoid measuring your success -BE SMART.

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