1 Surefire Way to Waste Every Small Business Advertising Dollar You Spend

Want to know how to waste every small business advertising dollar you spend? Just keep spending your advertising dollars and don’t track how your customers are learning about you and your business. Just keep putting money out and out and out and don’t bother to figure out how your advertising dollars are bringing customers (and their money) in.

Small businesses that don’t track and measure the effects that their advertisements are having on their customers are basically throwing their small business advertising money down the drain. Advertising executives read the numbers off of the advertising space, television and radio time, and many other forums for small business advertising. Advertising executives often push towards the demographics, readerships, and all around “hits” that your advertising has been receiving. It’s easy to assume with all these numbers being touted that your advertising message will be seen and heard by many, many people.

Small business advertising is much more than simply having your message seen by customers. First, your customers do need to see your advertisement more than once, because it takes multiple times before they’ll act. Second, that action is what matters Whether it’s grabbing the phone to call your business, or making a purchase on your website. And finally, you have to record which advertisements received the best actions taken by customers.

Ultimately, action based on your small business advertising is the only thing that counts. And since it’s so important, you should be tracking it as closely as you can. You should be calculating your return from every advertising dollar your spend on different venues and promotions. Doing this is the only surefire way to ensure that your money being put towards advertising is being well spent.

“How did you hear about our business?” This question is asked by some business owners to their customers or new clients, but many don’t even go that far.. Of the companies that do, only a few ever analyze or measure the data coming in. In fact, the data isn’t even completely collected.

Before you spend another dollar on small business advertising, the best thing you-as a small business owner-can do is to learn about the techniques profitable businesses use to track the results of their small business advertising. Learn ways to take your results, and compare them to the return from your investments. Learn how, and why variations of advertising are effective for your business. Figure out which customers that advertising is attracting-in terms of specific demographic groups. Study which advertisements are getting the best results out of your customers, based on your return.

Good advertising executives that know their way around the market and their businesses will teach business owners how to compare the data from your best advertisements. There are many simple but effective ways to do this. It doesn’t require surveys or other outside resources to easily poll your customers.

It’s really very simple. If you don’t want to waste every small business advertising dollar you spend, learn how to measure the effectiveness of your small business advertising before you invest any more advertising dollars. Ponder upon the next advertising executive that approaches you: “How can I track the results of this advertising that’ll show me how good you say it is?”

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