Ad Poll Results
image credit: 20minutos.es
Last week I posted a poll on advertising. 60% of those who voted in our poll say that they don’t book any advertising on a monthly bases. Why? Let me take a few guesses and you can let me know if I’m right.
1. Budget. You don’t have any money. OK, this is not a valid excuse for not advertising at all. There are lots of other ways to advertise out there that are free! For example, ad swaps with other shops or bloggers or pay pennies for Project Wonderful. As your business grows, you will need to start carving out a budget specifically for advertising and marketing.
2. No results. You booked an ad and paid what you think was way too much and got less clicks than you expected. Maybe you were able to measure sales and didn’t get any sales from that ad. So what? Advetising on the web is primarily about impressions, not sales. Being in front of someone’s face every single day is much more effective than a person randomly clicking on your ad.
3. ??? You tell me!
p.s. BAKERY does not recommend or condone renting sheep to wear your ad.
I just closed my shop a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about what worked and what didn’t (you know, for try #2).
One thing I’m sure of: I spent waaaay too much money on advertising. Next time around I won’t do any magazine or radio ads at all (I owned a shop in Wichita, Kansas and didn’t have an online storefront, so all my advertising was local) and I won’t advertise in the phone book. The only print advertising I did that seemed to have any effect whatsoever were small ads in the “Wichitalk” insert of the local paper. Ironically these were also the least expensive.
I worked with good advertising sales reps and bad ad sales reps, and at the time I trusted some of the good ones … but I shouldn’t have. One of the bigger disappointments was a full-page ad I took out for the first two issues of a new local magazine targeted at 20- and 30-somethings interested in local food, shopping, and entertainment–just my demographic, I thought. The ads were expensive (even with the rate they gave me, which was 50% off what they supposedly charged everyone else) and yielded maybe one or two customers.
My recommendation for others in my situation would be to think very carefully about the print advertising you buy and spend a lot of time making the actual ad perfect (and even more importantly, very well representative of your product/store/service).
I tried a few other things, none of which worked well. Another mistake I made was trusting my marketing firm, which supposedly was a think-outside-the-box sort of place but in practice kept me spending money on media that I didn’t need (but which they got a commission for).
The good news? Everything that worked for me was cheap or free. I got tons of press for unusual events or specials (a cheese ball contest, holiday wrapping parties, “Champagne Saturdays” during the holiday season). Social networking was also tremendously effective: I would estimate that 8-10% of sales in December could be attributed to our Twitter presence.
Next time around I will be spending a lot of time looking at some of the online advertising options suggested here. I did start blogging with a vengeance last fall and promoted that a little bit online. The initial results were pretty positive.
Hope this helps!
yes, the sheep idea would be baaaad. *slaps self for horrible pun*
Those are my two reasons for not advertising every month. I’d been doing pretty this year until this month, though. I hadn’t seen any results, from it so I was getting discouraged. It’s hard to have an extremely limited budget and spend money on advertising that doesn’t appear to be work. That’s when I wrote you.
P.S. I don’t want my comment to read as though I dislike or distrust marketers in general. I really wish I had been more careful and found a great firm to work with. I think what you guys do is exciting and this is one of my must-read blogs.
I’ve been testing the waters on advertising and the results vary, but I keep testing different blogs, websites, Googleads you name it. I think it is important to have your business or brand name in front of people’s eyes! I stick to my budget, and just spread the money really really thin! ;-P
Ha! The first time I had a small leather goods business I thought of printing t-shirts with my company name and logo and giving them away to homeless people all aver NYC.
I own a bakery in Memphis and we have a very strict “no paid ads” policy. Our customers know this and I’ve found it lends to our ’street cred’.
Our customers know that a) we stand behind our product so much, we refuse to advertise and b) that if they like us and want us to stay around it’s up to them to tell their friends, etc. It involves the customers intimately in the process.
That said, we DO market the business… we twitter, facebook, and keep a blog. We also have a monthly newsletter that goes out through constantcontact. We use these tools to occasionally promote a special or new product, but we mostly use them to connect to our customers and build loyalty. Our newsletter isn’t just a coupon or new item; we include relevant local information, recipes, and shop news. I’ve found our customers are a lot more likely to forward those newsletters to a friend than the ones that look like an ad.
We also participate in a lot of fundraisers for local non-profits, which draws people as well.
Basically, we try to keep our focus on our customers instead of touting how awesome we are, and we make sure that our customers notice it.
I hope this helps out!
Kat
Love swapping my advertising for handmade goods! Thanks for pointing out this option.
I found this topic and post VERY informative. I love swapping advertising for goods too.
[...] 2) Give it time. I bet that you don’t realize that there are hundreds of new visitors coming to that very blog every single day. That is hundreds of new potential customers. Wait at least 3 months to assess performance before pulling an ad. At that time, you can get a better idea of whether your sales have increased or you’ve gotten more exposure. Clicks aren’t everything. For more info read this post or this one. [...]