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Adding Direct Response into Small Business Advertising

Some small business advertising isn’t produced in order to make an immediate sale. There are advertisements and other promotional strategies which are designed to build or enhance brand image, raise or maintain consumer awareness of a given company, product or service as well as marketing materials which are intended to elicit an immediate response and hopefully, generate sales – and that’s what we’re going to be addressing here.

There’s many forms of direct response marketing, from the short-form advertising copy (such as print ads, TV commercials, radio spots, contextual PPC advertising, etc.) to the longer marketing messages like text-heavy, full page, advertorials and the Dale Carnegie-style sales letters. All of these techniques are valid, and which one you use to get your message out there mostly depends on what product or service you’re offering, and who you’re target market is; all of which you should already know if you’ve spent maybe ten minutes in marketing. – but when you reach your audience with your message matters just as much as everything else.

The Right Message To The Right Market In The Right Media At The Right Time

Direct response advertising campaigns rely on these four factors. – and we’ll briefly cover all four below:

Message: If you can’t effectively tell your target audience about the advantages over your competition in regards to your product or service, then it doesn’t really matter how good what you’re offering really is. – in other words you won’t make any sales. You need to appeal to people on several levels, especially on an emotional level if you want to spur them to action immediately. We’ll cover more about how to craft an attention getting message that closes the deal later.

Market: Again, it doesn’t matter what your product or service is or how great it may be or even how compelling your message is if you’re trying to sell to the wrong audience. In other words, don’t bring coal to Newcastle. You should know who your target market is, if not then you need to clear the board and start over with your business’ marketing research, before beginning any direct response campaign. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you’ll never be able to put together an effective direct response message.

Media: Depending on the demographics, and other areas that your marketing research has focused on, greatly come into play when choosing the type of media to use to attract your target audience. Depending on who your target market is, different media channels will be more – or less effective in reaching them. Some people are more influenced by direct mail, and some by print advertising, and others prefer online marketing strategies such as email and banner ads. Just like getting ready for a speech, you need to know who your audience is going to be in order to create an effective impact with your message and direct response method.

Moment: It’s not just about reaching the right audience with the right message through the right media; you also have to make sure that your message reaches them at the right time. What’s the right time, you ask? It’s not when you’re ready to sell but rather when your target market is ready to buy. You’re always ready to sell, at least if you’re in the least bit suited for business – but you need to remember that not every person out there is ready to make a purchase, even if they’re decidedly part of your target demographic.

Incorporating these factors: Message, market, media, and moment, can ensure that your direct response campaign produces positive results and a good return on investment by targeting the right people that are ready and willing to buy from your business right now.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways. You can keep in touch with prospective and current customers via a series of email messages using auto-responder software. If it’s more likely that your audience would go for offline methods, then by targeting the media channels that have the greatest influence on your target’s demographic area can ensure that your message is heard loud and clear.

But any way you look at it, these are the 4 componenets of successful small business advertising…

You’ve just read a small segment of the free guide titled “How to Use Direct Response Small Business Advertising to Grow Your Sales and Profits.” The guide is available for free – along with several other resources for small business owners – when you sign up for small business advertising e-course…

To learn more about how to massively increase the sales in your business through smart advertising and marketing, click the link to grab your FREE small business advertising Course…

Nobody gets Targeted by Small Business Advertising if Everyone is Targeted

Targeting is one of the most important parts of small business advertising. It’s important to stand out from your competition, especially when trying to appeal to a specific audience. Also you should prove that you’re overly capable of providing the product or service that your audience needs. Sometimes through small business advertising, the urge to be everything to everyone comes up. Problem is that this “one size fits all” marketing approach often ends with your audience being unable to recognize if you’re actually for them.

A lot of products and services are not made for everyone equally. It’s a waste of valuable advertising resources to advertise to people that aren’t interested in your product. A lot of small businesses make the mistake of thinking they have a larger target audience than they really do. Instead of narrowing their advertising efforts specifically towards their niche audiences, small businesses sometimes try a brand awareness approach, in an attempt to reach customers who might be in the market for their products in the future. Thanks to extremely high advertising budgets, big corporations can often have this approach work for them, but for small business it’s too high of a risk. Advertising resources are less effective by not raising brand awareness with your target audience.

As a general rule, people are only interested in advertising when it is perceived of immediate benefit to them. If they are currently interested in a certain type of product or service, there is a good chance of attracting them as a customer. On the other hand, those who are not interested in a product will simply ignore advertisements. And aiming your advertising towards the latter group will just end in wasted advertising money.

The first step towards maximizing your small business advertising efforts is identifying the perfect customer. The perfect customer is the one that would best benefit from your product or service. They being the ones that would bring in the most profit, and that you’d enjoy doing the most business with. Although most targeted advertising is geared towards a niche, identifying and focusing upon this “ideal customer” can help small businesses put a face on their target audience, which will help determine the best advertising methods to use.

For example, instead of advertising in all the magazines that are available, your ads should go towards specific magazines and be fine-tuned towards your audience in an area that most appeals to them. If you’re wanting to use direct mail advertising, then use demographics to target households and businesses that meet certain customer criteria. You can even develop certain landing pages that target different types of audience when using internet marketing.

Targeted marketing can make your small business advertising much more effective. Of course, there’s still a chance that those outside your target audience will notice your advertisements and take action occasionally. But you’ve gotten a bigger chance of grabbing your ideal customer.

Stealing the Competitor’s Clients Using the Number One Small Business Advertising Sin

Let’s not cut around any corners, and get right down to business. WIIFM (”What’s in it for me?”) this is the reason customers buy, but instead of focusing on their customers, some small businesses unknowingly commit the sin of advertising about themselves. Many small business owners, and sometimes their advertising executives can’t tell the difference between the two.

The thing is, you’re not alone. When it comes to small business advertising, you are definitely not the only one committing this “sin”. On the contrary, your competitors are doing it, too! This is mostly why you wouldn’t be able to get the results you’re after if you copy your competition’s advertising.

There is hope. You can make your small business advertising much more effective by turning this way of advertising away. Also you have to change the way you deliver your message, and the message itself to “steal” your competition’s customers away! Even using subtle, yet effective changes in your advertising, your competition wont even know what’s happening to cause their customers to go after your business.

As I’ve stated, tell the customers what’s in it for them, that’s the key to small business advertising. Basically your message should tell them why they should purchase your product or service rather than another businesses advertising. “We’re the best.” or “Cheapest” or the “fastest” is what many small business owners think answers this question, but usually they just seem self centered or like they’re bragging.

To be honest, they don’t want to hear it. They don’t care why you’re so awesome. They want to know what’s in it for them if they do business with you.

So make a subtle change to your advertisement to where it explains the customer’s “We’re the cheapest!” is something you shouldn’t say in your advertisement. Instead, in order to answer the customer’s number one question, they could put “You save big money!” The person reading or listening to your advertisement recognize that your focus is on them. The customer knows that it’s just for them.

Changing that focus through subtle changes in the words you use in your small business advertising is really very simple. “We” and “I” and “our” – into – “you” and “your” Is what it’s all about. Speaking directly to your clients to where they easily understand that you’re offering them the things they want through what you’re selling. But word it in such a way that says, “Your dreams will become reality with xyz.” Of course, “xyz” is your product or service!

It takes a bit of practice to do this every time, but you need to continually examine your small business advertising messages and adapt them as needed to make this distinction. As these adjustments are made, you’ll begin to notice an growth in business. They may not catch on to the subtle differences in your ads while heading to your business, but you’ll know it’s cause you avoided bragging, and answered what’s in it for them.

Grow Rich Buying Clients

Are you buying clients?

If you haven’t, you should be…

That’s why you buy small business advertising – to “purchase” customers…

Then they pay out more than the cost to get them…

So it’s an investment…

So we both agree on that, now how much are you paying for your clients?

And what’s your Return on Investment (ROI) on that investment??

If you don’t know the answer to any of these, then you’re just one of many…

The majority of small business owners can’t confidently answer these questions with data based proof…

And hey, they’re still in business…

So it must not be that big of a deal, right??

Well… That depends – on what you want to get out of your business??

Most small business owners make less than mid-level management at medium and large businesses…

And they end up working a lot more…

Some even have made it up into 6-figure net incomes…

And some have even achieved actual wealth…

It’s these latter few who I consider financial successes… Business successes…

Why would you work 80 hour weeks for 40 hour pay…because you love what you do?

Didn’t we all start out trying to better our lives with our business?

If so, then maybe it’s about time for us to think again on how we’re spending on advertising…

Find out how much each customer is costing you, because if you could greatly increase your profit, how much would you put into them?

Well, that’s the name of the game in small biz advertising…

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush…

Rinse and repeat… and repeat… and repeat…

Until it stops working… Don’t quit while you’re ahead with your advertisement… Keep on using it while it works and measuring its response…

But let’s get back on track…

Let’s answer those questions from earlier…

Like how’s your ROI compared to your client acquisition costs??

There’s a couple ways to track your ROI…

First is your break even point…

You’ll have cash flow problems if you don’t know this…

But if you know that you break even – and get that ROI of 1 – within 7 days then you can plan ahead…

If it takes you 7 weeks to get to that break even point, then you need to plan in a different direction…

You understand…

So, once you know your client-getting cost and your ROI at various points in time, let’s talk about how to improve your ROI…

There’s two ways in make your ROI better…

The only two ways to increase your business profits is to either lower costs or raise income…

Lower your client acquisition costs by finding better deals on advertising, or trying different and cheaper forms of advertising…

It could lead to improving your ROI, but not by much…

Because if you continue to go down on your costs long enough, you’ll end up at zero…

But if your ROI is 1,000% on every dollar, then who cares right?

Well what matters to us as small business owners, is what do I get to keep at the end of the day?

I say all that to tell you – don’t focus on ROI and forget about net profit…

By going the second way towards improving your ROI, you’ll succeed in two areas – a better ROI, and improved net profit…

The second method being to increase income from each new client…

The second method has two ways:

# Increase the transaction size for each client
# Increase the frequency of client purchases

You can raise prices, cross-sell items that loosely are associated with your product, upsell premium versions of your product or service, or sell add-ons at the point of sale in order to raise your transaction size…

You can increase the frequency of purchases by adding continuity to your business (subscriptions, membership, etc.), creating new products and services to pitch to existing clients, or offering another company’s product or service through joint ventures…

Using just one of these steps within the next month you’ll see an immediate increase in profits…

The difference between the successful small business and the failure is implementation of good ideas…

Many failing small businesses are run by business owners with brilliant ideas, who fail to implement them…

Don’t be that business owner…

Take what you are learning here and implement it – then share your success story with me so I can publish it on the blog…

Feel free to leave any questions or comments as always…

Here’s to always improving small business advertising!!!

1 Surefire Way to Waste Every Small Business Advertising Dollar You Spend

Interested in losing all the money you’ve put into small business advertising? Just keep spending your advertising dollars and don’t track how your customers are learning about you and your business. Don’t worry about how your customers are affected by the advertising you’re throwing money at.

Small businesses that don’t track and measure the effects that their advertisements are having on their customers are basically throwing their small business advertising money down the drain. Advertising executives use the small business advertising, such as the internet, on fliers, and other advertising space to read the numbers they produce. Advertising executives often push towards the demographics, readerships, and all around “hits” that your advertising has been receiving. How can advertisements that are being viewed by so many people be doubted, when all these numbers are being tracked?

However, advertising is much more than having your message viewed. Your customers do need to view your advertisement multiple time first, before they’ll actually take action from it. Second, that action is what matters Whether it’s grabbing the phone to call your business, or making a purchase on your website. Finally, you must record these actions based of which advertisement they were pulled from.

Ultimately, action based on your small business advertising is the only thing that counts. You need to be counting these actions as closely as you would the cash that your company brings in. You should be tracking and measuring your return on every investment and advertising costs in every venue and promotion that you put out there. This being the best approach to making sure that your advertising funds are being used effectively.

Some business owners ask, “How did you hear about our business?” to their old and new customers, but many do not.. The companies that do record the results, often never actually analyse the data. In fact, the data isn’t even completely collected.

Don’t spend any more money towards your small business advertising, at least until you’ve studied the techniques that profitable businesses use to track their advertising results. Then figure out how to calculate your return off of your investment using those results. Learn how, and why variations of advertising are effective for your business. Find out specific demographic groups in which customers are more influenced by your advertisements. Determine which advertising gets the best results for your business dollar for dollar.

An advertising executive that really knows his or her market and his or her business will help teach owners how they can measure results from their small business advertising dollars to see how effective it is. There are many simple but effective ways to do this. Polling your customers doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and can be quite simple to do.

It’s easy. If you don’t want the fate of many small business advertising that waste their funds on under-effective advertising, then learn how to measure the effectiveness of your own small business advertising. Then jump on the next advertising executive that comes near you and ask: “How can I measure the results of your advertising to see if it’s as good as you say?”

3 Laws for Success with Small Bussiness Advertising using Classic Salesmanship

What makes a consumer buy a product or service? One reason might be classic salesmanship from a salesman to a customer. And what does classic salesmanship entail? Getting to know the customer and how they can benefit from a product or service is step one. Then the salesman directs the customer to the product or service with the features the customer needs to get the benefits desired.

A good salesman does things that most small business advertising don’t. They elicit emotional responses with a customer using personal connections. Then it backs up that emotion with logic and reasoning that supports what they want to do based on their emotional response.

Most small business that advertises using print and other media simply tout the features of a product or service instead of explaining to the customer how they will benefit from those features. In reality, the customer doesn’t much care for a feature unless it directly benefits them.

For instance, one feature of a vehicle might be that it can fit seven passengers. But if I have a family of three, I have no reason to want or need this feature. It is of no benefit to me. But say a good salesman learns that my only child has a bunch of friends over to our house and that I shuttle them between activities a lot, the classic salesmanship can take over and the salesman will recognize that the feature can benefit me.. That vehicle with room for seven could make life easier because I can fit everyone into it, thus making me the coolest dad on the block cause my child can spend more time with friends.

In order to have effective small business advertising, it’s important to know something about your customers, or potential customers. When you know your customers well and can describe them, you can create small business advertising that will speak to those customers directly. You can show how they’ll benefit from your product or service.

Features. Benefits. Emotion. Those are the keys to small business advertising. But the response you want to get, and the order that these words and concepts matter to customers is in reverse.

First, your small business advertising must elicit emotion. An emotional response or reaction must be created. They need to desire and feel connected to your product or service.

Next, your advertising must show off the benefits that justify the emotional desire from your customer. Most people need to justify the expense of a product or service before they have a reason to purchase it. To help your customer justify their expenditure on your product or service, you need to describe the benefits.

Finally the features of a product or service can be showcased. Do remember that features only matter in the first place if they demonstrate the real benefits that support the customer’s emotional reaction and desire to purchase. So don’t start out by focusing on features in your small business advertising.

Remember, you want to elicit responses in the proper order if your advertising is to result in actual business for you. First, generate an emotional response. Describe the benefits that justify the purchase second. And third, highlight the features that provide these benefits.