The Catalyst

Here’s the challenge with advertising: All media “work”.

The key point to understand here is this: the rate of return on your advertising investment varies greatly from one medium to the next.

In the retail world, each week brings a new army of shoppers. These are your potential future customers. The size of that army might be 20% greater than last week’s army, or 20% smaller. We have no control over that fact. But we do control the ability to acquire as many people within that army of shoppers as customers, this week. Our job is to acquire those people as customers. That’s what makes good advertising.

Actually, our job is to acquire customers while minimizing the cost of customer acquisition. That’s great advertising. The best advertising maximizes the number of new customers out of any ad budget.

Why is it then, that we continue to see so many advertising budgets being wasted today? Is your advertising plan wasting money for your business? Is there any easy way to determine where the leaks are?

Here are eight places to start looking:

1. If you’re buying more than one medium, you’re wasting money.
2. If you’re using a passive reference guide as an advertising medium (think Yellow Pages), you’re wasting money.
3. If you’re paying more than $15 per thousand against your army of shoppers, you’re wasting money.
4. If you’re buying multiple television stations on a small or medium budget, you’re wasting money.
5. If you’re buying a consumer product schedule (scattered reach with little to no emphasis on frequency) to advertise your business, you’re wasting money.
6. If you’re buying a rotational schedule, letting the price of the medium (rate) dictate your placement, you’re wasting money.
7. If you’re buying prime time, you’re wasting money.
8. If you don’t have any selling proposition in your message, you’re wasting money.

Some of these may sound counter-intuitive to you … but all of these things waste the local advertiser’s budget. They all violate the law of acquiring new customers at the lowest price possible. Even if your current ad plan only commits one or two of these sins, there is ample room to improve your advertising.

And when you improve your advertising … you’ll also notice how this improves the bottom-line of your business. Now that is great advertising.

Call us to trim the waste from your ad budget … get more business per dollar starting today.

Craig Reumund is a Senior Consultant with ESA & Company. He meets with hundreds of local business owners each year and has significantly changed the fortune of thousands of local businesses over the past 20 years.