Do Your Adverts Work?Of all the ways to waste money on Marketing, adverts seems to be everyone's favorite. So I want to describe how you can get better results.
In my experience, many businesses depend too heavily on advertising, when there are many more effective ways to market. In addition, this can be one of the most expensive marketing options. So I would always look at more cost effective marketing strategies. But if you have already placed adverts, or plan to in the future, here are some basics on what works and what doesn't. Your first action should be to stop any advertising that isn't working! That may sound ridiculously obvious but you would be amazed at how many people are running adverts just because that's what their business has always done and they don't really know whether the adverts are working.
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 adverts are working or not. This is crazy. If your adverts 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.
This is known as direct response advertising. The other form of advertising is institutional (or brand) advertising. This is what Coca-Cola and McDonalds engage in. It's designed to build and sustain awareness of their brand. If you're in a small or medium sized business, brand advertising is almost certainly a huge waste of money. Unless you're a global multi national, the purpose of your adverts must be to produce a response. Smart marketers are ruthless in only creating and paying for adverts that produce a response - a profitable response.
In the advert itself the most important element is the headline. The headline is either the heading that goes at the top of the advert or if there's no heading it's the first words of the advert. The headline needs to 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. My experience when I first start working with clients is that many businesses are wasting money on ineffective advertising when they could be getting a much better return on other forms of marketing (Direct Mail, Telephone Marketing, Direct Sales, Email, Internet, Referrals, Strategic Alliances etc. However, if you adopt a structureed approach and conduct advertising properly by testing and experimenting, advertising can become a highly profitable element of your marketing mix.
Happy Marketing! Paul Robinson
www.Business-Solutions-Wizard.com
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