Which advertising media should I use?
In response to a recent post on askaboutmoney.com the following question was asked:
“I have been thinking of buying some air time on the screens you see in petrol stations and various shops.
Has anyone used this form of advertising before and if so did you get a good response?”
Here is the response I gave. I decided to post a copy here as I often hear business owners ruling out a particular media based on a bad experience or an ill contructed campaign:
Like all forms of marketing you need to make sure that the following are all in place and aligned.
Market, Message and Media. If you have a great message but to the wrong market then your campaign will bomb e.g. Targetting pensioners with offers a all you can drink nightclub offer will bomb while the same offer to students could be a great success.
In this way people often blame the type of media they are using, saying things like direct mail doesn’t work, when in fact if you look more closely then perhaps the message was week or the market poorly targetted.
Therefore I’m not sure if there is much value asking if a type of media is good and whether it got a good response. What could bomb for one offer and market could be hugely profitable for another.
The only way to reall see if this type of media will work for your offering is to do the following.
Determine who your target market is.
Test an offer on a small scale to that target market and measure the response.
If the results are favourable then do more.
If the results are not favourable then tweak either the message, market or media and rinse and repeat. Simple huh?!
Anyway if you think this media reaches your target market then why not approach the owners of the screens and see if they will let you conduct a test. Spend a few hundred on a test and make sure you have some kind of tracking mechanism in your advert so you can see clearly the response generated.
As with all media don’t commit to a huge amount upfront without conducting a small test first. If they wont let you do this then move on to something else. If you buy 10,000 impressions and get no leads then buying 100,000 is not going to give you much of a different result.
Only cut the stuff that doesn’t work
Cutting marketing costs might be the first reaction to a downturn. But, those that thrive during tough times take advantage of the fact that their competition is cutting back. They actually forge forward and spend more on marketing (only on stuff they know works) in order to eat up market share while others are struggling.
I bring this up because I’m curious about what you are doing during the recession. What specific actions you’re taking to increase sales in these tougher times?
The recession can actually give you the benefit of lower advertising and marketing costs which allow you to test different marketing strategies more cost effectively so that when the recession ends you will be in a strong position to know what works for your business.
Note that I also said only to spend on marketing that works. All to often business owners are not aware of which marketing they are doing which produces a positive ROI. One part of gettting smarter with your marketing is learning how to properly measure and track what you are doing. It doesn’t have to be complicated but unless you do it you are shooting in the dark.
Don’t blame the recession for your business failure if you don’t have your house in order
With all the doom and gloom in the air and business owners complaining that the recession is killing their business. It surprises me that some of them seem to have just given up.
For example 4 days ago I sent an email asking for a quote to 5 different businesses. 4 days later and only one of them has bothered to reply to me.
This is not a unique experience. On the 21st April I submitted a web form enquiry for one company and they finally got around to replying to me on 3rd May! Either the businesses I am contacting are in the lucky position of having all the work they need and they don’t need to bother replying to prospects, or there are severe holes in their customer service processes.
So before you moan about the recession and how it is killing your business, you had better be sure that you and your staff are doing absolutely everything they can to maiximise the leads that you are already getting.
I know of plenty of busineses who are applying sound marketing and other business processes and are in fact growing their businesses in the current economic climate, when others all around them are dropping the ball.
5 Steps to Success for 2008
I wish you and your family all the best for the New Year!
I hope you have made a resolution to make things happen this year!
I would strongly suggest you,
1) Set Your Goal,
2) Put a time frame on it,
3) Make a list of what you need to do to accomplish it
4) Make a plan
5) Take Action!
This is THE receipe for success!
If you would like some help taking your business to the next level this year please contact us now on 01 4433830.
What does keeping fit have in common with Marketing your business?
I’m very proud of myself, for the last 8 weeks or so I have managed to go to the gym twice a week. It was painful at first and I tried to come up with excuses not to do it. Now I feel much better and actually can’t wait until it is a ‘gym day’.
But what does this have to do with business growth and marketing? Well apart from giving me energy to get things done it occurred to me there are a lot of similarities with the results you get from taking regular exercise as there are with doing regular marketing.
I think it is human nature for us to want things and want them now. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can achieve long term.
Take a look at any gym in the first 2 or 3 weeks of January and you will see it is a hive of activity. Everyone is fresh with the new years resolutions and good intentions. People set themselves impossible goals of training for 1.5 hours per session 3 times a week. very quickly it all becomes too much and they give up too soon not getting to see any results.
The best approach, and the one I am taking with the gym, is to go only twice a week for 30 minutes at a time. This is enough time to give me an effective workout, but not so long that it takes a big chunk out of my day.
The same goes with marketing. If you try and do too much in one go it becomes overwhelming and you end up giving up, before achieving any real results. Instead you need to just do a little on a regular basis.
What if you were to send out 20 sales letters every day? Once the letter is written, printing and putting 20 into envelopes each day isn’t going to take any longer than 30 minutes. If you did this for a year then that could be 5000 letters out there helping promote your services. A 1% response would give you 50 new customers over the year. Customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Getting fit and keeping in shape doesn’t have to be difficult, neither does steadily growing your business. What we all struggle with is being consistent. But little and often is going to leave you both fitter and better off.
Don’t Annoy Your Customers with Trivial Things
Over the weekend I went to the UK to my best friend Wil’s wedding. I’m happy to say everything went very well, including my best man speech! We stayed at the Hilton in Warwick, and again just about everything was perfect. The staff were friendly and attentive.
My only gripe was that Hilton in their wisdom make a charge to their hotel guests to use the hotel car park! Yes the same guests who are spending money staying at the hotel and eating and drinking at it are charged the princely sum of £3 per day to park their cars there.
To me this is absolutely bizarre, it is not the amount of money they are charging that worries me it is the principle of the who thing. Why would you risk alienating your customers over something this trivial. Surely if I’m spending a few hundred pounds to stay the weekend it is a bit unnecessary to charge me to park my car. It is not like they were short of space, they have a big car park that was only maximum 10% full.
Often the smallest things in your business can annoy your customers the most. Make sure that you aren’t doing anything silly in your business that might jeopardise the relationship you have worked hard to cultivate with your clients and prospects.
Just Take Action! (But Make Sure It Is The Right Action)
Imagine two would be Entrepreneurs lets call them John and Mark. Both of them are working in jobs and dreaming of being their own boss heading up a successful business.
To save argument just imagine that both these guys have the same business ides. The idea is to start offering an online backup service to small businesses in Ireland to help them safeguard the information on their computers in the event their PC crashes.
Here is how Mark approaches his dream.
He makes a list of all the tasks that he needs to complete and draws up some goals for where he wants to be in six months.
He finds a company that provides white label software for setting up your own name brand backup service.
He commissions a web designer on elance to create him a website. He finds a hosting company to provide him with secure hosting space. In the meantime he puts together a list of business owners that he knows and calls them all outlining his new business and offering them to use the service at a reduced cost.
Each day in his lunch hour at work he calls 5 businesses and makes his pitch. Sure to begin with he gets very little interest, actually it is hard to even get past the secretary in most places, but it only takes him 20 minutes per day and after about 4 weeks he starts to get the hang of it and is signing up 1 business per week for a 1 month free trial.
After 6 months Mark is just ahead of his targetted goal and asks his boss if he can work a 4 day week, to which his boss agrees.
Now he spends half a day per week calling round to business parks and offices, and the other half day ringing his current customers and making sure they are happy with the service and asking them if they can recommend any other business owners that might be interested in the service.
He continues like this for another 6 months and smashes through his targets for the business. Now each month the business is generating enough income to replace 75% of his full time salary, he knows that if he were to be working at it full time he would be away. So he meets with his employer and explains the situation and amicably hands in his resignation. Mark is free from a Job and is now full time in his own business.
And this is how John approaches it.
He sits at his desk at work and fantasises about being his own boss, what kind of car would he be driving an nice new BMW 7 series – yes thats right.
He tells all his work colleaugues that they are wasting their lives, and that he is going to start his own business and break free from the rat race. Every lunch hour he spends 30 minutes reading a forum blog or coming up with a new strategy. Perhaps it would be better to offer other services as well as online backup, surely these business owners must want other things.
He dreams up all sorts of other schemes that could work alongside the main online backup business. Yes his company is going to be big, if Google can do all these different things then surely why can’t my business.
A month passes and John is still tweaking his business plan and financial forecasts, wow look after a year if all goes well I will be loaded he thinks.
6 months passes and by now all of Johns workmates and friends have got sick of hearing about how John is going to revolutionise the world of online backup. They joke amongst themselves that John is a bit of a loser.
A year passes and John has now has his business plan professionally bound and got a designer to create lots of different logos and created business cards and brochures. Now he feels he is ready.
He marches into his bosses office and tells him he is quitting. Life is too short to be sitting in a dead end job, John is going places.
He searches on daft and finds a nice central dublin office suite for just €1800 a month. He buys some furniture and sets up the office.
On his first day working full time for himself John gets in early. He spends the morning chatting to a mate of his on Skype about all the ideas he has for his business. Then he spends 2 hours adjusting the furniture in his office so it will look its best for his clients. 4:30pm comes and it is time to go home, hell he is the boss he can leave when he wants.
Now expand this same scenario out over 24 months.
Mark keeps adding customers each month and the customers he has are referring new ones on to him. He has been able to take on a telemarketer to set up appointments for himself to make his day more productive. He is signing up plenty of customers for his service. Sure there have been setbacks like the day when his backup server crashed and he had to let all his customers know they would have to rerun their backups, but these things are to be expected when running a growing business.
Meanwhile John has taken out lots of adverts in the paper and spent a fortune on a TV advert on the Dublin city channel, well he did look good sitting there in his best suit showing off his offices. But none of this has resulted in many customers. He spends a lot of his day on forums moaning and bitching about how it is so difficult to run a business these days. He has run out of cash so decides to take out a loan from the bank, surely it is only a matter of time before his business “comes good
So the moral of this story is start small and build up your business slowly, take action a little and often and you will get there. Don’t waste your time dreaming and procrastinating as this will only end in disaster and frustration!Stop reading my blog and take some action in your business!
How not to start a small business in Ireland
Here is a real life lesson that should be a warning to would be business owners in Ireland. Someone I know recently opened up an alternative health centre. They had an idea that they would like to offer Reiki services, and because they had an interest in angel card readings they also decided to open an shop selling Angel products. They rented a two room premises on the first floor of a high street. They spent 2 months fitting out the shop, buying stock and ‘getting everything ready’.
Now 3 months after they began they are starting to panick, everything is set up and they have spent well over €10,000 but there have only been a handful of customers and sales of less than €500. Given that this person gave up a well pad job of over €40,000 per year they are starting to get pretty worried about how to turn things around.
This person has made the classic mistake of thinking that because they have an idea and a premises and stock that they have a business.
They couldn’t be more wrong. What makes a business is customers, and lots of them, and a proven system for getting more customers, looking after the current ones and keeping in touch with them.
What she should have done? If we were to rewind the clock with the benefit of hindsight this is what this person should have done before quitting a well paid job and spending €10,000 of their hard earned savings.
- Start small on a part time basis. Rather than launching full on with all the overheads of a premises and no initial income I would have recommended that she hang on to her job, taken just one room of premises or maybe even started from a spare room at home. If things started to take off then she could have then tried to cut back on her work and gone part time. People often forget how hard it can be and how long it can take to replace a full time income from a new business. Often it can take entrepreneurs years to get to the stage where the income they take from their business is on a par with that from their previous jobs. Sure sometimes you can get lucky and have a business that takes off like wild fire in the first month but hey you also have a chance of winning the lotto too…
- Not tried to do too much. Instead of trying to open a shop and provide therapies at the same time I would have held back on the shop and just focused on one core aspect of the business, the therapies. Once that was up and running then by all means add on other additional services.
- Perfected the marketing. Rather than spending all her savings on stock I would have recommended she invest her money wisely on a proper marketing plan and execution of that plan. It can take a lot of time and resources to identify which is going to be the best way to attract paying customers and better to do this when you have the safety net of a secure income from a job to fall back on rather than when you are down to you last few euro.
The trouble is everyone who ever started a business always presumes it will be a huge success and doesn’t consider
failure. All to often people focus on what I call the ‘fluffy’ aspects of starting a business such as buying a flash computer and making their premises look just right. Don’t get sucked in by having to have a fancy website, stationery and other such things. Instead if you focus on the one thing that matters – getting and holding on to customers – then you will do much better in the long run.
What Business Are You In?
When asked what business are you in most business owners will respond by telling you what their business provides, for example I am a dry cleaner or a shop owner.
However I want to challenge this perception.
I would argue that every business owner is in the business of marketing. If you own a dry cleaning business then your business is really to market dry cleaning services as without marketing there is no business. By making this distinction it forces business owners to reevaluate how they spend their time. In the example of the Dry Cleaners rather than working in the day to day operation of the business i.e doing the actual dry cleaning the owner should be focusing on growing and marketing the business. So for example they should be devising marketing programs, testing different forms of promotion etc
All to often business owners get so absorbed in what their business actually does that they forget the key point to actually growing and having a business that works without them is systems and marketing. Once you can get into that mindset then you start to see the difference between having what is effectively a job working in your own business to switching to the mentality of being the owner of a business.
Michae Gerber explains this much better in his book E-myth - why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it. I recommend you get a copy and start to develop a business owners mindset.
Spend your start up funds wisely
I was in a recent discussion with a designer about whether or not start up businesses should hire a fully experianced high priced designer to create their business logo and stationery or would it be better to use a cheaper freelancer or a service like the sitepoint contests.
Whilst I agree that you get what you pay for to a certain extent I also believe that if you are starting a business with a limited budget then spending a large chunk of your start up budget on design and fancy business stationery may not be the best use of funds.
I often encounter small businesses that have spent a tonne of money on getting a fancy website and business stationery designed but have not gained any customers from it. I believe that perhaps getting a lower cost logo created initially and channeling your resources into what really matters – making sales – would be a better use of start up funds.
After all getting enough customers is the key to any new business. When the phone is not ringing and you are wondering how to pay the bills sitting looking at a fancy logo and stationery isn’t going to be much consolation.
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