I recently acquired four additional books from Amazon.com, Every one concerning Retail Store Advertising and marketing. One looked promising. It was written by someone who really had a local business. She offered gifts. She had valuable information on inventory control, employing, location, and taxes. But what she believed about advertising sent chills running down my spine.
She talked about an Advertising Budget. In other words, setting aside a particular sum per month only for advertising. Commonly this is in the form of a percentage of overall sales. Eight percent is ordinary. I've heard up to 15% of gross sales as your best budget. These numbers are told by sincere, educated people as some type of fact. NO, NO, NO!
This reveals a thorough confusion of what advertising is. Advertising is an investment decision made to produce new customer sales. These people are treating it like advertising is an expense. If you track ad concert, this modification in opinion will pay very big, very quickly.
Let's say you mail a flyer, or place an advertisement on TV or the Radio, and the ad (or series of ads) costs you $1000. Is $1000 your budget? It should not be. If the advertisements bring in just $500, what will you do next time? Hopefully not squander it again, even though it was your budget.
If you run an advertisement for $1000 and it generates $5000 in new business ($2500 in profit) do you stop just because you already reached your budget? No. If you can double your money in thirty days you do it as regularly as you can.
If you test new ads and track your response, you will swiftly see that you simply keep re-investing in proven ads and discard the losing ads. That's how you grow.
Are you guessing about what works and not analyzing your losers? That's guaranteed to keep you in the "ad Budget" group. In other words, not knowing what works.
Ads either generate a profit or they don't. If they do, keep doing the ads as long as they are generating a profit. When they eventually die, bury them. All ads eventually die. The only people that keep saying that you need to repeat an advertisement to make it pay are ad salespeople.
If your ads produce a profit, who cares what the budget is? Don't stop! If your advertisements don't work, who cares what the budget is? STOP!
This is the actual advantage of monitoring advertisement results: You'll realize which advertisements pull their own weight and modify appropriately.
Author Resource:
Small business advertising and local marketing expert Claude Whitacre wrote The Unfair Advantage Small Business Advertising Manual. You can download a complete copy of this book at http://www.local-small-business-advertising-marketing-book.com You can also just purchase the book at http://www.claudewhitacre.com
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