1 Surefire Way to Waste Every Small Business Advertising Dollar You Spend
posted in Off-line Marketing |Want to learn how to lose all of your small business advertising money? Just spend all of your money on advertising and don’t worry about what your customers are finding out about you and your business. Just keep throwing away your money without learning how your advertising is bringing in customers and their revenue.
Small businesses that don’t track and measure the effects that their advertisements are having on their customers are basically throwing their small business advertising money down the drain. Small business owners and managers talk with the advertising executives who sell them advertising space or time-on television or on the radio, in the newspaper or magazines, on the Internet, in fliers, or in other avenues-and they hear about the numbers. Advertising executives often push towards the demographics, readerships, and all around “hits” that your advertising has been receiving. How can advertisements that are being viewed by so many people be doubted, when all these numbers are being tracked?
But advertising effectively is about more than having your message seen and heard. First, your customers do need to see your advertisement more than once, because it takes multiple times before they’ll act. Second, it is that act that matters. That action is potential customers picking up the phone, calling your business, coming through your business’s front doors, clicking onto your website, or purchasing your products or services. Lastly, the actions taken by your customers have to be recorded based off of which advertisement or promotion was viewed.
All in all, the actions taken after seeing your small business advertising is what’s really important. You need to be counting these actions as closely as you would the cash that your company brings in. You need to be recording and calculating every penny that you’ve put into advertising venues and promotions. Doing this is the only surefire way to ensure that your money being put towards advertising is being well spent.
Some business owners do ask their customers or new customers, “How did you hear about our business?” but many do not even do that. For the companies that do, only a handful of them actually return to the data for analysis. In fact, the data isn’t even completely collected.
Before you spend another dollar on small business advertising, the best thing you-as a small business owner-can do is to learn about the techniques profitable businesses use to track the results of their small business advertising. Then study ways to take those results, and calculate into them the return off of your investments. Learn how, and why variations of advertising are effective for your business. Figure out which customers that advertising is attracting-in terms of specific demographic groups. Determine which advertising gets the best results for your business dollar for dollar.
Good advertising executives that know their way around the market and their businesses will teach business owners how to compare the data from your best advertisements. There are many simple but effective ways to do this. It doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t require an extensive survey or outside resource to poll your customers.
Piece of cake. If you don’t want to waste every small business advertising dollar you spend, learn how to measure the effectiveness of your small business advertising before you invest any more advertising dollars. And then ask the next advertising executive who approaches you: “How can I track and measure the results of this advertising to prove that your advertising is as effective as you say it is?”
