If you lose track of 3 key essentials, advertising can kill your business as quickly as it can make it.
1. Advertising equates to new business.
Yes, advertising should generate new business. But it should also encourage former and existing customers to remain with your business. New customers are often more demanding and are more costly to service than existing customers. If you only focus on new business you will lose your existing market and gradually put yourself out of business.
2. Numbers matter!
No they don't. Becoming fixated on the numbers is sure death to your business. Focusing on likes, hits, views and click throughs are not what advertising is about. Advertising is about building customer confidence in your business. If you do that your product or service will sell itself. This is called branding, it is what successful businesses spend the most money on.
3. Selling the product.
Anyone can supply a product, often far cheaper than yourself. What you have to sell is a solution. Most customers are overwhelmed by people trying to sell them the same products and services. They know all about the technical aspects and probably know the costs and prices better than you do! What you have to do is sell them a solution to their problem.
Advertising is about building awareness, to publicising, to promote, to market. If your potential customers don't even know what you do and what you can do for them, you will never be able to sell to them no matter what deals or discounts you offer.
As in any endeavour it is often best to take professional advice before you start. Just be sure to ask the right professional, a business advisor, your accountant, your web designer, photographer or video producer may have their opinions, but they are not professional advertisers. Talk to a specialist advertising consultant if you want objective advice. It may cost for “Free advice is seldom cheap.” However it can save you far more than a few pennies in the long term, it may even save your business.
Gavin Bryan-Tansley Owner Vid-FX+
