No matter how good you are at what you do, if not enough people know about you and your product or services, your business won’t be as successful as it can be. Word-of-mouth recommendations will certainly help promote your business, but the best way to let prospective clients know you exist is through one-to-many advertising.
This means paying to get your company information on lists, on web pages, in publications and anywhere else that your market may be. There are several important things to keep in mind regarding how and where you should advertise.
1. When it comes to buying NEW advertising, you must treat it as a risk.
Essentially, you are gambling on the results you hope to achieve when you try any NEW method of advertising. When you do buy advertising from a new source for the first time, view the money you are spending like chips you would plunk down on a roulette table. You won’t know for sure whether you’ve laid your marker in the right place until you give the wheel a spin – until you test the source and track the results.
2. Like gambling or buying stock, don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.
3. Trying to predetermine how many leads the money you’re spending on advertising will bring you is pointless. You can’t know for sure because there are many variables. Some of the variables are under your control. Some are not.
4. The copy you send out should be one of the variables under your control.
Your content should say what you want it to say, in the way you want it said. Make sure you are consistent and clear with your message.
5. Research your advertising options.
When you hand over money for an ad, it’s guaranteed that the ad will go out and that a certain percentage of people will see it. So, you do have some ability to determine how many people you can potentially reach through certain means of advertising. Typically, look for publications online and offline that are targeting the audience you want to target.
6. Consider list advertising.
In addition to traditional advertising, you can pay companies to send a mailing to their list, both online and offline. Sometimes they have a collection of advertisements and send them all in one go. You can also do a “solo mailing,” where they will mail their whole list one email about your product or service. This is a great value in that you are not vying for attention with other advertisers, but it will cost you more money to stand out.
7. When you’re making a decision to advertise on a list, look not only at the size of the list, but at the owner’s relationship with the list.
Here’s what I mean by that. When you’re buying this kind of advertising, it’s easy to be swayed by the size of the list. The list owner may have a list of 100,000. You could argue the point that if only 10% of them open their emails, you’ll get 5,000 leads from that.
But, what influences the result more is the relationship that the list owner has with the list. Those really big lists may seem tempting and even look like a shortcut to you. “I’ll just advertise in these and sit back. This will produce all the leads I need.”
But, if the list owners send mailings to those lists every single day, they are not going to get the same attention as the list owners who only send mail once a month.
Some list owners might send out 100,000 emails, but have only an 8% open rate. It could be that only 8,000 people are even opening that email.
Ask questions like, “How often does your list hear from you?” “What are the types of things they hear from you?” “Can you give me any statistics on the percentage of opened emails you get?”
Look for Part II tomorrow …
Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com
Tips for Using Paid Advertising to Generate Leads – Part 1