What advertising has worked for YOU? What worked for me is

Groups like BNI and Letip are fantastic as long as the group is large enough to make a difference. Smaller groups will usually result in a lot of wasted time, unless the few people there are well connected.
 
Majestic said:
These advertising vehicles have worked for me:

a) Business Networking (being part of BNI/Business networking international in my case)
b) A monthly ad in my local suburban newspaper
c) word of month (of course)
d) Advertising on Craiglist (not a VERY high success rate, but it is free advertising so I can't complain over the business that did come in)


These vehicles have NOT worked for me:

a) Advertising on Kijiji
b) Advertising in the Yellow Pages (HUGEEEE Mistake and very pricy)
c) Magnets on my car
d) Facebook (so far, working on it though)


I'd love to hear about everybody elses success and not :)

Majestic
Click to expand...

When doing business to business I had the best luck taking my card and some donuts around to all the office/industrial parks and going once a week or two and eventually everyone got to knew me and some assumed i was their IT guy. I made enough contacts to do about $1000 per week give or take $200.

Later I moved into retail home support and opened a shop. Yellow pages drove most of my sales in. I began with what I could afford which was about $159 per month, next year doubled it, next year doubled it again until it was up to about $1200 per month per two yellow page books. I then rolled them both back to about $600 and $750 respectively and I still get most of my clients this way.

Direct mail around my office within 3 miles. Mailing to existing customers every three or six months. Full auto wrap decals on both vans seemed to help. I also did a penny saver ad for about $40 per week and ValPak coupons.
 
Just wanted to give another kudo to BNI. For over a year now...both my colleague and I that each are members of separate BNI groups...we've been asking for leads for this one particular large construction company.

I recently switched BNI chapters to a new, more local one that just started up 10 months ago..they've not even been around for a year yet. Under 20 members. But very young, energetic..and focused on one particular town...very "localized". Anyways....I'm only several weeks into the membership of this chapter, I ask for "an in" with this particular construction company. I get "I know so-and-so" from two people in my chapter.

Just last week we got a call from one of the VP's of this company...asking us for a meeting. We meet him....and we got them as a client...starting our first "work day" with them tomorrow. This is a company that does huge projects for towns...big big construction stuff like the whole waste treatment plants for towns/cities..stuff on that scale.

The business we'll get from just this one client will easily pay for the BNI fees for both my colleague and myself for many years....and then some.
 
Im new in advertising business, and tried:
leaflets = nothing
facebook = nothing

only thing that worked was listing my company in yellow pages, but it is not going well, overhead is bigger than income.
 
I've also only stated my business recently and have been starting out advertising slowly at about $200/month. That money goes directly to a local paper in my area that hits about 1000 home users that are mostly middle aged-baby boomers, and the other part of the $200 goes to my PR Gal who does fantastic work designing my ads.

Word of mouth works great. When I did side gigs here and there at a younger age, my clients loved me so much they kept my number... I'm finding out they must have kept it from over 5 years ago and are still calling me!

I've done about a trial run of 50 leaflets at my local chiropractors office since he loves what I'm doing, and have only gotten about 1 call from there to basically pay for the leaflets.

I live by the rule of 3 though. To try things 3 times and gauge how it's working. Some will only be done once though... pending success. So far I'm breaking even with this advertising, but I'd still say I'm winning since these new clients love my work so much they refer my name on.

I haven't tried ad-words yet with Google, but I will soon after hearing all this success. I haven't done any SEO work yet either, but the last couple calls I've gotten were from people who say Google turned up my search results as number one in my area for computer repair... good news there.
 
dapana said:
I live by the rule of 3 though. To try things 3 times and gauge how it's working.
Click to expand...

Yea good idea. There were times I would drop 300 leaflets and get no calls, and other times I'd get calls immediately (and sometimes end up with repeat customers). Still, I've found letterbox leaflets probably the most productive & cost effective in generating work. Though I havent dropped any for years (I advertise in the Yellow pages and get enough work from that w/o having to go and drop leaflets) I do recall still getting phone calls some years later from the leaflet drops.
 
Word of mouth will slowly but surely build your business. I have had OK return on investment with ad words, but I am in a relatively small target market. I get a fair amount of feedback for not having an ad in all our local phone books. There are three in our market that cover our town. Trying to put a small ad in each.

A friend who has a computer business in the next town over said his biggest bang per buck was hanging a big "OPEN" flag by his door.

I have a couple temp signs out in front of the shop for screen repair and virus removal, they bring in some new customers also. I try to remember to ask new customers how they found out about my business, usually they say " oh Joe from Bangor told me about you" or something similar.

Every market is different, just remember to keeping working at it.
 
1. First page of Google, preferably top - the only place to be.
2. Word of mouth - always do a good job, it speaks volumes. Give out 3 or 4 business cards every visit.
3. Website - don't be anonymous. You are going into someone's house and are handling their data. They need to trust you.
4. Treat every call with the importance that it deserves - you never know what it will lead to.
5. Village mags - pay for themselves time and time again. Your advert pays for their printing and distribution to the mag advertisers are the first ones called.
6. Local phone number - people like to Go Local first
7. Car advertising - it works. Park it to be seen when on a call. The neighbours of the call you're on talk and everyone has a computer.

I'm interested why the OP says magnets didn't work on his car. To me it's a one off cost and worth doing. I get so many comments about my car/name/advertising.
 
Last edited:
I have gotten:
A bank chain
A an architect
a builder
a travel agency
several well off retired people
and a marina from Rotary International. I have also gotten referrals from the places listed above AND people like seeing the Rotary sticker on the door and know I give back to the community. Rotary has helped us far more than the local Chamber of Commerce.
I find that I target any business based off of word of mouth, such as real-estate. I have almost every real-estate office in town and the surrounding towns, and they give great referrals! Referrals are still #1 for us and always have(approaching 1 year of business).

The flops where social/inbound marketing and magazine adds. Newspaper adds seem to do better, but keep in mind we get 1 newspaper a week and we have a good number of retired here.

In the process of writing this up, I had a customer come in after he found me in the Yellow Pages.

From your suggestions, I will look into BNI.

Thanks!
 
Last edited:
Hello,

The back of my business cards have a $10.00 referral fee for any New Customer referral resulting in a sale of $75.00 or more. Customer puts their info on card, gives to "new customer", I then send a check to previous customer. You can put any stipulations you desire in the format.

Only costs a few dollars more for the 2nd side printing and doesn't cost anything if not used.

I have been using these for about a year with great sucess.

Sure, I lose $10.00 on the 1st sale, but most end up being repeat customers and I more get a more than decent ROI than any other advertising I've tried.




Harold
ACS Alternative Computer Solutions
 
Rob_NNCC said:
I have gotten:
A bank chain
A an architect
a builder
a travel agency
several well off retired people
and a marina from Rotary International. I have also gotten referrals from the places listed above AND people like seeing the Rotary sticker on the door and know I give back to the community. Rotary has helped us far more than the local Chamber of Commerce.
I find that I target any business based off of word of mouth, such as real-estate. I have almost every real-estate office in town and the surrounding towns, and they give great referrals! Referrals are still #1 for us and always have(approaching 1 year of business).

The flops where social/inbound marketing and magazine adds. Newspaper adds seem to do better, but keep in mind we get 1 newspaper a week and we have a good number of retired here.

In the process of writing this up, I had a customer come in after he found me in the Yellow Pages.

From your suggestions, I will look into BNI.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Well hello fellow Rotarian!
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Just wanted to give another kudo to BNI. For over a year now...both my colleague and I that each are members of separate BNI groups...we've been asking for leads for this one particular large construction company.

I recently switched BNI chapters to a new, more local one that just started up 10 months ago..they've not even been around for a year yet. Under 20 members. But very young, energetic..and focused on one particular town...very "localized". Anyways....I'm only several weeks into the membership of this chapter, I ask for "an in" with this particular construction company. I get "I know so-and-so" from two people in my chapter.

Just last week we got a call from one of the VP's of this company...asking us for a meeting. We meet him....and we got them as a client...starting our first "work day" with them tomorrow. This is a company that does huge projects for towns...big big construction stuff like the whole waste treatment plants for towns/cities..stuff on that scale.

The business we'll get from just this one client will easily pay for the BNI fees for both my colleague and myself for many years....and then some.
Click to expand...

Nice work! Very sound advice about BNI in this thread...
 
Word of Mouth
Facebook
Car Magnets
Craigslist

Other than word of mouth, Facebook has brought in the most leads. Remember to ask your clients how they heard about your company!
 
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