March 18, 2010

Losing All of your Small Business Advertising Dollars in 1 Easy Step

Want to learn how to lose all of your small business advertising money? Keep spending your advertising dollars and don’t worry about what customers are discovering about you and your company. Don’t worry about how your customers are affected by the advertising you’re throwing money at.

Most small business owners wouldn’t dream of throwing their small business advertising dollars into the trash, but that’s pretty much what they’re doing when they spend money on advertising and then don’t track-and measure-the results. Advertising executives read the numbers off of the advertising space, television and radio time, and many other forums for small business advertising. The executives often throw out numbers about demographics, readership, listener-ship, viewers, and “hits” your advertising will be exposed to. It’s simple to believe that with all these numbers being spread around the advertising world, that your advertisement is being seen by many.

But good advertising takes a bit more than just having your message viewed by customers. Your customers do need to view your advertisement multiple time first, before they’ll actually take action from it. Second step that matters is the customer’s action. Whether it’s grabbing the phone to call your business, or making a purchase on your website. And finally, you have to record which advertisements received the best actions taken by customers.

So basically, the main thing that matters is that action based off of your small business advertising. And because it counts so much, you should be counting it-every bit as much as you count the cash your customers are spending as it comes in. You should be calculating your return from every advertising dollar your spend on different venues and promotions. This is the only way you will objectively be able to determine where your advertising dollars are getting results and being well spent.

“How did you hear about our business?” This question is asked by some business owners to their customers or new clients, but many don’t even go that far.. The companies that do record the results, often never actually analyse the data. In fact, the data isn’t even completely collected.

Don’t spend any more money towards your small business advertising, at least until you’ve studied the techniques that profitable businesses use to track their advertising results. Then study ways to take those results, and calculate into them the return off of your investments. Learn how to determine which advertising is effective for your business and why. 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. You can easily do this in many successful ways. Polling your customers doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and can be quite simple to do.

It’s easy. So if you’re not looking to throw away all of your small business advertising funds, then learn how to track the success of your small business advertising before spending more money towards advertising. 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?”

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