Losing All of your Small Business Advertising Dollars in 1 Easy Step
Friday, March 5th, 2010Do you know how to throw away every dollar you’ve spent towards small business advertising? Keep spending your advertising dollars and don’t worry about what customers are discovering about you and your company. Just keep throwing away your money without learning how your advertising is bringing in customers and their revenue.
Most smart small business owners wouldn’t throw away money towards advertising without tracking and measuring the results the advertisements bring in. Advertising executives read the numbers off of the advertising space, television and radio time, and many other forums for small business advertising. Demographics, viewers, and “hits” are the numbers that advertising executives often refer to when it comes to the results of your advertising. It’s simple to believe that with all these numbers being spread around the advertising world, that your advertisement is being seen by many.
Small business advertising is much more than simply having your message seen by customers. First your customers do need to view your message multiple times before they’ll act, that’s a given. Second, it is that act that matters. Potential customers coming in to your business, or clicking onto your website is that action. Third you have to record these actions by studying which advertisement
Basically, the results from your customers based off your small business advertising is what matters. And since it’s so important, you should be tracking it as closely as you can. You should be calculating your return from every advertising dollar your spend on different venues and promotions. This being the best approach to making sure that your advertising funds are being used effectively.
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. Then study ways to take those results, and calculate into them the return off of your investments. Discover how different variations of your small business advertising is being productive towards your business. Find out specific demographic groups in which customers are more influenced by your advertisements. Determine which advertising gets the best results for your business dollar for dollar.
An advertising executive that really knows his or her market and his or her business will help teach owners how they can measure results from their small business advertising dollars to see how effective it is. There’s many ways to easily accomplish this effectively. Polling your customers doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and can be quite simple to do.
And there you have it. If you don’t want the fate of many small business advertising that waste their funds on under-effective advertising, then learn how to measure the effectiveness of your own small business advertising. Then jump on the next advertising executive that comes near you and ask: “How can I measure the results of your advertising to see if it’s as good as you say?”