6 Simple Rules for Effective Advertising – Part 2

In my earlier article about 6 simple rules for effective advertising, I covered defining your business persona, making a plan and being prepared. In this article I will cover the 3 remaining simple rules for effective advertising.


4. Make Your Advertising Great (or don’t bother!)

There is a lot of bad, very bad advertising in the world today. As a general rule you should only try to sell one thing at a time, people (usually) aren’t going to take a lot of time with your advertisement, either it tells them what they want to hear, at the appropriate time, or they aren’t going to remember it. You should always try to make your advertising as remarkable as possible, make an extraordinary claim, something no one else is doing. Almost anything you can think of to stand out – This can be a great way to optimize your business for a new kind of customer, start with an idea, for example, we  decided to start with the offer  “All university students receive a  fixed fee of $50 for their computer services” –  and worked backwards to accommodate the demand and improve our workspace and processes to accommodate the rise in demand.  While we made significantly less per customer than we would normally have, we were able to access a brand new niche and gain a fantastic number of referrals and recommendations.

Another idea (if you don’t like the sound of that one) we had was the $100 dollar PC upgrade and clean for home users. Essentially we would install another stick of ram, and perform a full computer tune up (automated of course !) covering defragmenting, registry checks, disk checks and virus scans. This promotion was very successful ,and cheap to implement, while we didn’t make huge amounts of money out of it, we were able to further increase our customer base.  More to the point it was something no body else was offering, the idea stood out, targeted a specific group of people, and forced our business to grow.

5. Stick to a schedule

One of the worst things you can do as a business is treat marketing as an optional activity, ideally everything you do should contribute to your advertising (see Chuck Romano’s Article – The Roller-Coaster Marketing Cycle), but you should not neglect your other advertising campaigns, even when you are busy!

Firstly you have to remember that there is always a lead time for advertising, just because someone see’s your ad today doesn’t mean they will require your services tomorrow. The important thing is to establish a presence in a relevant magazine, paper or other medium and keep that presence alive.  In my experience people usually call my business when they have a problem, so just because people aren’t calling doesn’t mean that your advertising isn’t having an effect.  You should think of your advertising as “educating” your clients on your services and existence so that in the event they do require the services you offer, your business is the first thing on their minds.

If you truly are too busy with the workload you have, then you may want to consider raising your prices, hiring some help or cutting back on the services with are least profitable or most time consuming.  Once you stop advertising, you run the risk of losing the attention of the consumer, and ultimately their business.

6. Ask Questions, Learn and Evolve

Every year huge corporations spend millions of dollars on market research, they want to know the trends, understand their customers, get ahead of the competition – and so should you! Luckily for us, most of the information you need wont cost you any money – it comes from your very own customers.

Obviously with new customers it is essential to find out how they found out about your business, but you can go deeper than this . Try to find out why your customers love your business, the real reasons why they keep coming back, what you do that they simply can’t live without. These questions provide  huge insight into the real strengths of your business, something with is very hard to recognise from within.

I usually send out a small questionnaire to any new client with their first invoice, either as an online survey or a mail back option . This information probably costs me between 1 or 2 dollars a client, but it provides invaluable insights into improving the general quality of the business as well as potential niche products and offerings which you may otherwise have missed.

In our situation we were having problems with a newer staff member, we knew there was a problem as customers would mention problems off hand to myself, but not go into detail. From our perspective he performed well in the interview, and passed  our technician skills test, we knew there was something wrong, but the difficulty was nailing down exactly what the problem was.  This is when we decided to implement an anonymous feedback system, much like Technibble’s recent survey, we would ask a variety of questions (with each new invoice) covering everything from our work processes, the staff member and our general business activities. This information has helped us shape and grow our business, as we feel that we have connected to the average consumer, and been able to respond to real information from the people who matter.

Not only did this insight help to solve our new staff member problem,  (He was not explaining to customers why he was performing certain tasks), it also helped us change our approach to in-house computer services so that customers believed they were getting value for money. Eventually we also started applying some of this information to our external advertising, we created a series of targeted campaigns focused on professional small business owners (doctors and lawyers etc.) emphasizing our ability to simply solve their problems with the minimum of fuss – with great success.

Software such as Qualtrics, Survey Monkey and many others all let you set up free accounts if you want to give this a go, and I believe for a years subscription you can pay around $400 dollars for the full program and features. In reality this is not a lot of money for the benefit you will receive; loyal customers, better advertising and above all clients who actually VALUE the services you provide.

 
Written by James Gilbert