How effective is your advertising?

Despite the plethora of marketing streams available to businesses in order to promote their services or products, advertising is still the most widely used medium in terms of dollars spent. Whether you are a small business that runs a regular ad in the local newspaper or Yellow Pages, or your organisation promotes its services via TV and radio, the percentage of your marketing budget spent on advertising will be a significant proportion.

There is no golden rule about advertising budget allocation nor where you should place your adverts.  Every business is different and even within every business, there are organic changes.  Seasonal or trend changes inevitably impact on the way you do business.  How you should address those changes must be reflected in the way you promote your products or services to the market.

The most important consideration about advertising is not necessarily where you do it nor how much money you throw at it.  The most critical factor is how you do it.  There is no point screaming at the top of your voice in an empty room or trying to sell your finest range of needles in a giant haystack.

In today's world, we are bombarded with information every minute of every day.  Some sources estimate that we can be subjected to around 3,000 messages daily — from logos on car number plates to TV ads and billboards.  The human brain, despite its phenomenal processing power, cannot possibly absorb all of that information and so retains only a fraction of it.  Consequently we do not even realise we have been exposed to the majority of those 3,000 messages.

In order for your message to be noticed by your target audience, it needs relevance, appeal and most importantly, retainability.

Let's take newspaper advertising as an example. The circulation of our local newspaper is 62,500, with a readership of 88,000 so the coverage for an ad is very good.  A quarter page display ad for a four week run at a cost of around $1200, means that the cost per thousand (CPM) of readers reached is a healthy $13.65.  On the face of it, that's a pretty cost effective way of getting your message to a lot of people.  Unless . . . they don't notice your ad!

In that case, you've thrown $1200 down the plug hole — with little chance of any of it providing a return.  The newspaper in question regularly carries well in excess of 500 display adverts every week.  How many ads stick in your mind when flicking through a newspaper?

Before you start bagging the publication though, you need to carry out some analysis.

First and foremost, get professional creative help in designing your ad campaign.  Creative marketing is crucial in providing the opportunity for your advertising to have an effect in a crowded forum.  It is money well spent if your return on advertising investment is increased dramatically.

Secondly, monitor the response from this and every other form of promotion you do.  If leads start coming in, you MUST find out how they heard about you.  If it was from your advert in a newspaper, then you know that it is working and you can calculate the returns on the amount invested.

Don't be complacent.  Marketing in all of its forms is an investment, not a cost.  You need to manage that investment like any other and ensure that you are getting a return on it.

"Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does." Steuart Henderson Britt