Who Else Wants to Cut Their Advertising Costs by 37% While Increasing Sales by 15.6%?
Hi, good afternoon. Today's topic is "Who else wants to cut their advertising cost by 37 percent while increasing sales by 15.6 percent?"
I use those figures because that's what we've been able to do for one of our clients in an established industry that didn’t grow as much. We have documented results. I want to talk about , related to that, how you can approach your advertising and increase sales while spending less money on advertising.
Typically, what happens if I go into a business from a marketing consulting perspective, and they don't have a true marketing person ‑‑ by that I'm talking about somebody who's given the title of marketing director, marketing coordinator, etc. in a small business, which is typically what you see. Somebody is out there and their whole job is to go to networking events or something.
I'm talking about a marketing professional with decades or years of experience and education behind them that can take a coordinated approach to marketing. If you walk into most small businesses, they either don't have a person or they don't have the right type of person.
I guarantee you, without a doubt, you're probably going to find advertising dollars that are literally being thrown away. This is because you don't have a person to help you identify the wasteful dollars.
If you don't have that, here are three tips that can help you. The first is, if you know enough to want a way to track the ad by a custom landing page, offer, or tracking phone number, and you know that. If the ad rep tells you that you don't need to do it because it's a brand awareness, don't waste a penny on it.
Don't waste any advertising on something that you cannot track to see if it's working. When we did this with one of our clients we saved them $27,000 on advertising that they had spent year after year, but had never produced results. We cut it completely and used the money for advertising that we could track and sales grew.
The second thing is, if it's something that can potentially be seen by everyone and gets sent to everyone in a wide geographic area, chances are you're throwing your money away. Not everybody is going to use your service. Not everybody's going to need your service.
A geographic area doesn't necessarily define us anymore. You can go into any neighborhood, etc. across the spectrum and you'll find people with varied interests, varied personalities, varied family types, etc.
Geography doesn't necessarily define us. As a small business, don’t say “I'm going to market to everybody in Seminole County, for example, Florida, or Orange County, whatever.” That is not effective. Don't do that.
The third thing is, if it contains many of your competitors, so you're one of many, why are you advertising in it? The advertiser doesn't care whether your customer chooses you or your competitor. They have one focus.
They want to get people, businesses, to advertise in their medium. They want to get them to advertise in their magazine, their newspaper, their radio station, their billboards. It doesn't matter.
Their whole job is to get business for their channel, so to speak, so they don't care. I can go into any magazine. I just got one the other day. There are two or three different jewelers, for example, in there. They don't care. As long as the advertiser's paying the bill, that's fine with them. They couldn't care less if it's working or not.
You, as a small business owner, need to hold every channel, everything you do, accountable to see if it's working to drive revenue for you, because you're a small business. You don't have millions of dollars to waste. You don't have that luxury, so you have to make every dollar count.
Of course, this relates to the first one, you need to make sure that everything you do is trackable. Don't listen to an ad rep who says it's brand awareness. Don't, because brand awareness can often translate into brand awareness and product awareness. Product awareness might lead your potential customer to go to one of your competitors.
This is Brad Swezey, President of JustSmallBiz Marketing. You can reach me at brad@justsmallbiz.com or call me at 321‑613‑8476. Contact me for a Free, no obligation, consultation.
