9 Reasons Your Small Business Advertising Ideas Will Fail
Think about your small business advertising. Is your small business marketing system more of a shot in the dark? Maybe “spray and pray”? If you’re like a lot of local business owners, you probably have a standard advertising budget that you work with and review at the end of each year.
Maybe you’ve come up with something creative once in a while but aren’t sure if it’s working. You would love to skip the long learning curve, skip the trial and error and hopefully skip all the frustrating mistakes that most businesses make when they try to get more customers. So let’s look at 9 standard mistakes small business advertisers make and how to avoid them.
1 — Putting the Cart Before the Horse
Often, when I speak with small business clients, I find they are not all that thrilled with advertising. They’re not sure what works and what doesn’t. This is often a classic case of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
It’s a smart idea to conduct marketing before advertising. Promoting your brand to everyone can be very expensive. So what’s the difference between marketing and advertising?
You can think of marketing as identifying customer needs and figuring out how to meet them. Advertising involves promoting a company and its products or services through paid channels. Essentially, marketing is finding the right people to target for advertising.
If you’ve ever done this step before, then you know there are several ways to approach it. However, I’ve discovered that the most effective way to complete this step is by heading back to the drawing board.
Look at who your product has a natural connection with and see how many of these people can afford what you’re selling. A bit of in-depth research can take you a long way to making your small business advertising dollars go very far.
2 — Treating Prospects Like a One-Night Stand
I know that this sounds harsh. If you can’t get back to someone you pitched an offer to, then it’s not worth pitching to that prospect at all. Most people have grown up with advertising on television or the radio.
This is the basic format that most business owners are used to, as well. An offer is made and then we wait to see who responds. If a prospect response to the pitch but says no, that seems to be the end. There is no attempt to follow up with the people who say no the first time.
Wouldn’t it be better to get back to that prospect and give them more reasons to close the deal? Of course! The Internet has made this process very easy. Establish a way for prospects to hear your pitch after they’ve left their contact information. The most popular way to do that right now is through a sales funnel and email marketing campaign.
Use a retargeting service that allows you to interact with prospects who have visited your site or clicked on your offer. Once they have visited your online ad, variations of your ad will appear on other websites that they browse. This is an effective way of embedding your brand into the minds of prospects.
3 — Asking for Customer Reviews but Then Ignoring Them
Check out your online reviews if you own a local business with an excellent reputation. Recent studies show that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. But let’s go a step further. Take the time to respond to those reviews on the web. You can use the reviews’ quotes in your advertising. Promote your brand by emphasizing the positive reviews you’ve gotten.
4 — Failing to Follow Up with Your Customers and Prospects
You’ve worked hard to convert your offer into sales, but you seem to be too busy to follow up. Every customer is worth their weight in gold. Establish a platform for engagement in order to keep your customers coming back and referring others to your service or products.
5 — Working On Too Many Campaigns at The Same Time
Having a local business and being willing to promote it is valuable. Now and then, we get excited after reading an article about a clever way to promote our business. There is a temptation to try something completely different, even as we’re in the middle of other campaigns. This is the kind of decision that can destroy a small business marketing budget.
Our days are busy as it is! I’m definitely guilty of doing this. If you’re running a monthly challenge and someone gives you a fresh idea for a new campaign, mark your calendar. If it still seems like a sound idea after you’ve tracked the current campaign results, test it out. Save your time and money by focusing on one campaign at a time.
6 — Pulling Your Advertising Before the Campaign Ends
When I was working in local advertising (what seems like a century ago) I always had to remind business owners that advertising was like the medication we take to stay alive. It might be inconvenient, but stopping can really kill you.
When advertisers just produce the campaign and forget it, they ignore the critical part of the process. There are three goals of advertising: to inform, persuade, and remind consumers about your product. You can tell whether your ads are working by tying them to relevant ad metrics.
Concentrate on the ones that are most relevant to your campaign. It would make sense to monitor brand awareness, recall, social sentiment, and earned mentions if your goal is to build brand awareness in a new market.
These are the tests that measure consumer preferences, awareness, and purchase intent. It’s tough to collect brand data without a tracker, though. It’s even more frustrating when one small tweak could make a dramatic difference in the results. Passive ad campaigns are usually self-defeating. If only they didn’t make the next big mistake.
7- Not Interested in Split Testing Ads
When discussing an ad campaign, I usually talk about split testing early in the conversation. That’s because I want clients to realize how powerful that process is for results. Split testing works by creating two variants of an advertising page. Not too many changes, however.
It’s most effective to keep it to one significant element per split test. A slight change in color or headline copy can mean a major difference in audience reception. After sending paid traffic to the two samples, keep the winning sample.
8 — Avoiding an Online Audit Prior to Your Online Promotion Campaign
Imagine building a brand online and spending a hefty sum, then finding out that most of your traffic is directed to another website with a similar name! Yeah, not securing the dot com and other iterations of your internet presence can really kill your branding efforts. So can critical reviews, faulty addresses and other contact information in prominent listings. Online reputation management is a key step in your marketing campaigns.
9 — Forgetting to Track Your Results
There are 10 standard metrics that are routinely tracked.
Tracks how well your products and services are recognized and accepted.
Brand Consideration — the level of interest in buying your offers.
Brand Awareness — top of mind knowledge of your brand.
Click-through-rate — the number of times your ad has been clicked when it has been shown.
Earned mentions — remarks and links resulting from organic web traffic from online publishers.
Conversion rate — how often an ad is converted into a sale.
Cost per click — the amount you pay for each click or other type of action.
Impressions — How many times someone has seen your advertisement.
Return on ad spend — how much revenue you earn per dollar that you spend on advertising.
Social media sentiment — how people bring up their feelings and attitudes on social networks.
Advertisement metrics ask a few key questions; can your audience identify your brand among others? Does your brand top the target prospects’ minds? Finally, is your brand worth purchasing?
Keeping track of all of them isn’t necessary, though. Just pick two or three and track them on a consistent schedule. Continue to test and tweak to see if you can improve your stats.
Congratulations — you now know how to screw up your advertising campaigns. So the next thing you need to do is decide to commit to doing things the right way. Because the sooner you do, the sooner you can reap the benefits of hindsight without the mistakes.
When you decide to execute an ad campaign, get your marketing done first. Then, stay engaged with your prospects and customers, take them through a sales process, and remain in touch with them after the sale.
Coming up with ideas for small business marketing is fine, but you’ll want to schedule time and resources to test them. Be sure that the are compatible with your existing small business marketing plan.
Just remember, “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.” Stay on top of your campaigns for maximum results. “What gets measured, gets done.”
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