One of my marketing mentors, Seth Godin, spoke about this topic recently in his blog post On Buying Unmeasurable Media and it got me thinking about how many businesses spent tens of thousands of dollars on marketing things that can’t be measured or tracked. This got my brain thinking and here is my opinion on this and what you can do about it if you currently are buying unmeasurable media.
TV, radio, billboards and other types of media are starting to become less and less effective as we become more accustomed to being bombarded with this information on a daily basis. When you are watching a tv show and all of a sudden it goes to a commercial break, are you excited to watch the commercial? Are you anxious to see that there’s a new TV out that’s better than the one you bought yesterday that was considered the best ever created? Of course not, commercials interrupt what we are doing and are flat out annoying the majority of the time.
How about ads in newspapers? If you own a business you have probably tested an ad in the paper and not known whether or not it’s actually gotten you any business. For all I know, you may be paying $100 a week to have an ad in a newspaper that never brings you any business. That adds up quickly, $400 a month and that’s if you are only paying $100 a week on this ad, certain newspapers cost thousands per week to have your ad in. How often do people walk into your business and tell you “I saw your ad in the newspaper and just had to come in to buy _____”?
If you are paying $100 a week on this, you could easily take that $100 and spend it on Google AdWords or Facebook Ads and you’ll be able to track who either buys a product directly, or who you get on your e-mail subscriber list for further sales.
Say that you only get 10 people onto your e-mail list from this promotion, they will be on your list for a few months if not longer and you can let them know every time you have a sale going on with a message sent right to their e-mail. Do you think this may be a little more effective than hiding your ad in that super busy classifieds area of the newspaper?
Measure Everything
This is the way that direct marketing works. You do X and receive Y as a result. It’s direct, and it is accurate because you can measure it. If you can’t measure something, why would you do it?
The problem here is that this might not be the way that you do it, so you’re scared to jump into it because…what if it doesn’t work? Or better yet…what happens if it DOES work and you end up having more business than you can handle?
The Difference Between Small Business and Major Corporation
If you are reading this, you are probably a Small Business Owner. This means that your customer base is typically in a geographical area, like a 10-50 mile radius around your store. This is different from major corporations in that major corporations are advertising to the mass market. Everyone in the USA and other countries can be their target market, so they have to have a different marketing strategy than you, right?
Correct! That is why you should not follow what they do. There’s a reason that major brands spend billions of dollars on branding, marketing and advertising budgets. That reason is because they want to build up global brand recognition. Your small business just needs to build local brand recognition, which leads me to my next point.
Only spend money on advertising that you can track.
If you are using a radio ad, offer a 5% discount to everyone who mentions they heard about your store on the radio and says a little catch-phrase like “Radio Store Super Deal!”, you’ll think of something better.
If you are using coupons in a newspaper, get the number of people who receive the magazine and then test to see how many of the people who receive the magazine actually came into your store from one of the promotions. This is done by simple math, X people came into the store with the coupon divided by Y(number of people who receive the newspaper) X/Y = percentage
You also need to look into e-mail marketing as well as advertising with Google to grow your e-mail list. This is an asset waiting to be tapped into for you.
If you want to learn how you can use e-mail marketing, Google and social media to grow your list. I would be more than happy to help you and you can learn more about hiring Chris Hughes here.