NFIB

Getting Your Money's Worth While Covering All Your Advertising Bases
03/ 14/ 2002


The old saying, "Advertising doesn't cost, it pays" is true only in some instances. Well-placed advertising certainly can help a business grow, but there are a few specific things to watch out for before laying your money down. In today's Workshop, Jeffrey Moses shows how to get the most bang for the buck in each of the main advertising categories small to mid-size businesses use.

Yellow Pages advertising can be a great way to bring in new business. But caution should be urged when signing up for your first Yellow Pages ad, because once you pay and the ad is in the phone book, you're stuck with it for the entire year whether it produces for you or not. After all, they're not going to reprint the phone book for you.

Four tips for Yellow-Page advertising: 1. Don't put your ad in every category suggested by the salesperson. Start with a small ad box in the category that most closely fits your business, and see how it draws throughout the first year before expanding into other categories.

2. Don't be talked into taking out a larger ad than you initially decided on.

3. Look at older phone books and see how many companies are placing ads in the same Yellow-Pages categories year after year. This is a good indication that those categories work.

4. Many cities have numerous phone directories. Don't be tempted to advertise in all the directories the first year. Take things slowly, letting success lead you to new advertising venues.

When advertising in newspapers, be aware that placing an ad one time only may not be successful. Repetition is the name of the game in all advertising, and even more so in newspapers because readers tend to breeze from page to page. Most readers won't even see your ad if you run it only once. If you're planning a newspaper advertising campaign, plan to place regular ads over the course of several weeks at a minimum. A month or more is even better.

Magazine ads, on the other hand, should produce results even from the first one or two issues. This is because readers generally keep a magazine longer than they do a newspaper -- and many look at every page. As a rule, place a one or two larger, more expensive magazine ads rather than a series of smaller ads that will get lost on the page.

Radio advertising by its very nature demands tremendous repetition. Don't even think of running less than 15 ads on a station during a one-week time period. Best is to plan on running an ad 60 times or more over a month. For best results, try to get the ad aired during approximately the same time period everyday. This will help assure that the same people hear it again and again. And remember that the cost of radio advertising is highly negotiable. Get bids from competing stations and play them off against each other. Try to get the price down to 50 or 60 percent of the published rate.

Television advertising can be highly successful, but it's expensive from the start. First, you need to put considerable funds just into production of the commercial. Costs can be cut by letting the station produce the commercial for you (with you as a 'talking head,' but your production will look cut-rate and may be a 'laugher.' (Some auto sales companies have tremendous late-night success with such laughers.) To get a good-looking ad, you'll probably need to work with an ad agency or freelancer who specializes in TV production. The best buys in TV right now are local cable stations that may be able to target specific geographic areas for your ads.

Billboard advertising needs to be short and sweet. It works best when conveying a simple message: Call this number, Go to this location, Use this product. Avoid any text that may be confusing or hard to read. Remember, people are usually looking at a billboard as they drive past. Graphic design of a billboard is crucial to its success. When it comes to negotiating the best rates, consider placing your billboard ads in an off-season and asking the company to keep the billboard up for 1 1/2 or even twice as long as the normal time frame. If they don't have the board rented, they just might do it and you'll get double exposure.

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