1 Guaranteed Way to Lose All of your Small Business Advertising Money
Want to learn how to lose all of your small business advertising money? Then keep spending your dollars for advertising without keeping track of what your customers are learning about you and your business. Just keep putting money out and out and out and don’t bother to figure out how your advertising dollars are bringing customers (and their money) in.
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. Small businesses get with advertising executives that sell them advertising space, or time on television and radio, plus many other venues, and they hear about the numbers. Advertising executives often push towards the demographics, readerships, and all around “hits” that your advertising has been receiving. With all these numbers out there, it’s easy to believe that your advertising message is being received by many, many people.
However, advertising is much more than having your message viewed. First your customers do need to view your message multiple times before they’ll act, that’s a given. Second, it is the action that is what really 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. Third you have to record these actions by studying which advertisement
All in all, the actions taken after seeing your small business advertising is what’s really important. And since it’s so important, you should be tracking it as closely as you can. You should be counting it and measuring it and calculating your return on investment for each and every advertising dollar you spend in each and every different advertising venue or promotion. 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. Of the companies that do, only a few ever analyze or measure the data coming in. 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. Learn ways to take your results, and compare them to the return from your investments. Learn which small business advertisments are being productive towards 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’s many ways to easily accomplish this effectively. It doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t require an extensive survey or outside resource to poll your customers.
And there you have it. 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. Then seek out the next available advertising executive, and ask: “How can I find out for myself how you track the results of your advertising and how effective it is?”
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