Cost
Effective Advertising
I
was just reading some posts on a small business message board and several
members were asking about advertising. That is a subject that always
interests me because no small business, including our own, has an unlimited
advertising budget so it is vital that you make your advertising dollar
work till it drops from sheer exhaustion.
The people
on that board discussed advertising by fax and advertising by mailbox
postings.
In case
you're not sure what was meant by those terms let me tell you that there
are companies that will send out your message to the fax numbers of
your target audience.
And mailbox advertising is advertising that is placed straight into
the private mail boxes of your target audience at each post office.
The cost
of this form of advertising is not huge when you consider it's potential
reach, but it is still important to consider just how effective that
form of advertising might be.
You want
your message to get in front of the eyes of the people who matter in
each business and it's going to cost you money to do so. Will you achieve
that with either of these forms of advertising?
While you
will never know for sure if your message reaches those important eyes
it is not difficult to reach a reasonable conclusion based on some logical
assumptions.
It is quite
safe to assume that the task of emptying the mail boxes of most businesses
will be assigned to a fairly low level person within each company and
it is not unlikely that the person who clears the mail box will also
be trained to cull the mail. They will sort out the junk from the real
mail and dispose of the junk as soon as possible.
By 8am
every morning the garbage bin outside our local post office is always
full to the brim with discarded junk mail and I doubt that it's any
different anywhere else.
And the
same happens with incoming faxes. It's usually left to a low level person
in the office to harvest the those incoming messages and they too will
be trained to cull the junk and dispose of it.
So if you
use either of those methods how often do you think your message will
get to the decision makers who may authorise the purchase of your product?
With a
limited advertising budget it's important to use cost effective means
to get your message across to your targeted audience. Depending on the
product you sell you may find that some of the more traditional ways
of advertising are much more effective.
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