Put Those Advertising Dollars to Work

So there's a crunch on the economy but as any business knows, you still need to advertise. You could have the greatest product or service in the world, but if nobody knows it, then you won't get sales - people just don't randomly knock on your door and ask what you're selling, right?

The trick now is get those same advertising dollar, or more likely less advertising dollars, to do more for you. Here are a few ways to do this.

What are you paying per month with yellow page advertising? It's expensive. Can you cut back? Can you have a smaller ad or remove the color from it? Look at the savings there. Sure, maybe you can't get out of your contract now, but it's probably coming due soon.

I talked to a client this morning who is going to reduce the size of their yellow page ad and work more on their website. They have our CMS, so they're adding more pages and updating it more often since they've found that most of their business comes from the website anyway. Their Yellow Page ad will just list their phone number, one line of text and the website address.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Websites are cheap. Considering the amount of space you get, what the site can do and not to mention all the tracking that's possible, websites are the cheapest form of advertising out there. You can really only take advantage of the web's power if you site is well designed, easy to maintain, search engine optimized, has call to actions built in and works in conjunction with your other marketing.

Another way is to change from expensive TV ads to radio ads. If your marketing includes mentioning your website (and it should), then people are more likely to go to your website if they're listening to your ad on the radio than watching your ad on TV since most people are not watching TV and using their computer at the same time. They're more likely to have the radio on when working with their computer. So there's another way to save on advertising.

One other idea that comes to mind is to target your print/mail advertising more. Instead of sending out a $0.50 brochure to 2000 addresses, refine your mailing list to 500 addresses but make sure your mailing list is more targeted or else do more mailings to that same list, driving home your message with repetition. You'll want to mention your website on that marketing collateral of course - since the web is so cheap.

Not to get off topic (and I'll close with this), but I just can't believe it when I see companies advertising and they choose not to include their website address (URL or domain name) on their vehicles, brochures, yellow page ads, stationery or even in their email signature. The web can support other forms of advertising so well and people like going to websites, so why not mention it? Well, maybe if their site isn't that good, I can understand that.

-Tony

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