During the course of everyday business, it’s easy to get caught up in buying an advertising ad here, and making a donation there, and appearing in the same publication your competitor does. But all of it tends to happen as isolated incidents and not part of an integrated, coordinated strategy. This is a costly reality for a business because you’re stuck marching to someone else’s beat, not your own tune. Periodically, every business needs to hit the reset button and determine where all outward facing energies are being spent and to begin to make intentional choices about where they will be spent in the future. This opportunity for a reset can make more efficient use of advertising dollars, marketing energies and return a more effective and efficient campaign.
Advertising and Marketing Reset
To perform this reset for your business is not complicated. First, gather all the outward facing marketing expenses you have incurred in the last quarter. Be sure to include all costs associated with: television, radio, newspaper, magazine, signs, flyers, newsletters ads, donations that result in a sign or ad, yellow pages and directories, your website, your paper-newsletter, your e-newsletter, your phone system messaging, your email system, social media, and groups you maintain a membership in.
Once you have all that information gathered, it’s time to decide what your advertising and marketing goals actually are (and your brand intention). Next, ruthlessly, compare each and every expense you’ve identified to your advertising and marketing goals. The ones that make a significant contribution to your goals should stay and should continue to be executed as is. The ones that do not, either need to be executed in a different manner in order to meet your goals or eliminated in favor of cost-savings or a different opportunity that more closely aligns with your goals.
Your Advertising Payoff
What you get for all this work is more efficient execution of your marketing and advertising goals. In some cases, you’ll save money on your advertising. In other cases, you might spend the same amount, but make better choices around advertising and marketing messaging. And in nearly every case, you’ll know that your brand is being executed efficiently through your marketing and advertising efforts.
I think that advertising is the easiest way to gain client or costumer, the most important part of any business is branding the way we can attract clients. I really appreciate this great information that you have shared it is very useful.
I found it interesting to hear that GM wasn’t having much success with it’s facebook campaigns yet Ford has. As a graphic designer, I haven’t had much luck with google or facebook advertising. Organic search is where I get my business. If I could find a cost effective way to obtain more paid advertising I would. Advertising agencies seem to be best suited for larger companies…freelancers like myself simply can’t afford to hire the help necessary. I’d love to find an advertising agency that only profited off of results.