Should you advertise?

Advertising is one of those things that just about every small business owner considers at some point. After all, that’s how big companies promote their businesses, right? So, shouldn’t you be doing it as well?

Well, while advertising has its place in promotion, it has a number of drawbacks which means it’s often not the best method for small business owners. Let’s have a look at some of these.

Firstly, advertising is great for generating awareness of your business. It tells everyone who you are and what you do and people will notice you and realise that you’re around. However, while it’s great for building awareness, it’s not too good at getting customers. Only 1-2% of people seeing, listening or watching adverts actually buy directly from the advert.

Secondly, advertising needs to be repeated often in order for it to stand any chance of being effective. You need to be repeating it at least three times: let’s face it you might see the advert and mean to do something about it, but not get around to it. And if you need to repeat it, this can become effective.

Which brings me to my third point, advertising is a pretty expensive way of doing marketing – the average cost of an advert in your local paper (and I’m talking about a small advert here) is around £150+VAT. If you need to repeat your ad at least three times, that’s £450+VAT before you even start. And if you do radio or television advertising, the costs can end up being astronomical.

With all these drawbacks, my preference isn’t to advertise, but to concentrate on free or low-cost methods of marketing that have the same impact. After all, if advertising is better for awareness than getting customers, believe me there are at least 50 different ways I can think of, just off the top of my head that will create the same result, but cost nothing to do.

Having said that, there are some good deals around at the moment if you negotiate and are not afraid of walking away if you can’t reach the price you’re prepared to pay. And there are quite a few places where it’s very cheap to advertise and might well be worth exploring. For instance, church magazines tend to be very cheap to do as do adverts in post offices or supermarkets.

Advertising in the yellow pages is also free and is a must for all small businesses – remember yellow pages is where people go if they know your name but can’t remember your contact details. Don’t be tempted to pay for an advert until you know it works. If you get business from a free advert, you’ll definitely get business from a paid advert in there. Test it first.

If you’d like a copy of my 50 free ways to promote your business which is now a 14 page factsheet, please feel free to contact me on helen.dowling@exceptionalthinking.co.uk

Exceptional Thinking (http://www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk) provides help and advice for small business owners on their marketing and to people setting up in business.