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If you are in the Yellow Pages or in the Local Papers you can be sure to get phone calls from other companies asking you to advertise with them. There are other forms of advertising such as a smaller, third party versions of the Yellow Pages, coupon books, business papers etc.. The can be very hit-and-miss.
Most people are willing to tell you how it works for them and often with colorful results. About a year ago I had a salesman from a local business directory visit my office trying to get me to advertise in the publication. He was a great salesman with a great angle, had a folder full of testimonials from happy customers and I was almost about to buy. It was a great deal, but first I decided to call five of the computer businesses listed and asked them how it worked for them.
The first business said they hadn’t received any calls from it.
The second business said they will not be re-advertising with them next year.
The third didn’t even know they were in it.
The fourth said they won’t be re-advertising either.
And the fifth went absolutely crazy when I mentioned their name saying “don’t do it! It’s a scam! If it’s not working they will tell you it’s because you haven’t got a large enough ad and scam more money out of you! Don’t do it!â€Â
Five out of five businesses weren’t saying anything good about it so I sent the salesman on his way. He would have had a sale if I hadn’t called those businesses.
Conclusion
There are many external variables which will change the effectiveness of your advertising such as the income level of the area you are marketing in, the size of the area you are covering, the amount of publications in your area and the amount of competition advertising along side you. You will have to try a few different forms of advertising before you know what works best for your business. With every phone call you receive, be sure to ask where people heard about you from so you can track it!
In the U.S., it is illegal to put flyers in or on mailboxes.:
Here is the answer from the United States Code at 18 USC §1725:
“Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter such as statements of ccounts, circulars, sale bills, or other like matter,
on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box established, approved, or accepted by the Postal Service for the receipt or
delivery of mail matter on any mail route with intent to avoid payment of lawful postage thereon, shall for each such offense be fined under this title.” (CFR TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 83 > Sec. 1725.)
Rich, is that America wide or only applies to certain states?
that is country wide.
Really great article, thanks for writing it! I started a computer repair service company a few months ago and we are definitely having some trouble building new business up. We’ve advertised in the Yellow Book which has been ok, but nowhere near enough business as we need. We did try a local paper by purchasing a bigger ad, and got 0 calls from it. We’ll be doing some door hangar advertising next, hoping that helps! I do like the idea of the smaller line ads in the paper though, and will probably be giving that a shot.
One thing you didn’t mention was press releases…did you have any experience with that?
Dave, I havent tried it with my Computer Repair business but I use them frequently for Technibble. I found that you need to send your release to ALOT of locations/emails for it to be effective. Only about 5% will pick you up, but those 5% can be worth it.
As for your advertising with bigger ads, you might be interested in this:
http://www.technibble.com/advertising-bigger-is-not-always-better/
[...] How to Advertise your Computer Business - So you know nearly everything there is to know about fixing computers. You can build a computer in your sleep and have all the BIOS beep codes committed to memory. Great! Now we need to get some clients. In this article we will be covering various different forms of advertising and their effectiveness. [...]
[...] are still many cheap ways to advertise your business mentioned in one of our past articles “how to advertise your computer business“. Print This Post Del.icio.us Article By [...]
I want to subscribe to your advertisement listing for UNIX/Windows computer repair
Please send me email.
Yeah I’ve tried the mailbox drop before. Got a strongly worded letter from the USPS.
Great information. Thank you, love your whole site…
My question is, for flyers, is it better to use my own name or use my company name that I have set-up? Which will return more results?