In my last post I wrote about where to advertise and how this should be driven by understanding who your ideal client is. In this follow up post I’m going to briefly discuss where not to advertise.
Where not to advertise…
The simple answer to this is anywhere where you get a sales call or email from someone trying to sell advertising space. UNLESS you’ve done your research and the will reach your target market and you believe, from your analysis, you’ll get a good return.
One of my pet hates is directory advertising. I’m forever being bombarded with sales calls and emails trying to get me to advertise on some new directory or other. The simple fact is that over the years I’ve spent literally £1,000’s on directory advertising with almost no results.
These days I’ve become wise to it and I’ll use a ranking tool such as Alexa to work out whether its worth my while. Invariably it usually isn’t.
I find Alexa useful because it gives an indication as to the volume of traffic a site is receiving. The simple rule is that if Alexa reports the directory is receiving less traffic than mine it’s probably not worth advertising there.
You do need to treat the figures with caution though. Make sure you’re looking at the national traffic, not the global data. You should also look at the traffic volume too. Remember this is for national coverage so you’ll need to make a judgement on what it would be like in your region and its likely to be significantly less.
BTW, I’ve pressed directory owners to give me their estimate of local volume in the last, especially if they’ve been very pushy on the phone. None of them have. In fairness I suspect they don’t have this data but it’s a great way to get rid of them because they know you’re aware that on a local basis their traffic will be significantly less than the figure heave quoted.
Who.is is another great tool. If you visit who.is you can enter the web address for the directory and it’ll tell you when the domain was registered. If it was only recently you can make your own mind up as to whether its worth it or not.
The same goes for magazine and newspaper advertising too. Make sure you’re going to get the coverage in the region you operate in. For me, advertising nationally is a waste of time and money. I trade locally here in Surrey so advertising all over the UK is pointless. It’s also much more expensive to advertise in a national publication too.
Whatever you do, don’t just buy what seems like cheap advertising because the salesperson on the phone pushes you into it. Do your research. If it addresses your target market it might be a good opportunity. Chances are it isn’t because your own research would have picked it up if you’d been thorough enough.
One story I like to tell is the salesman from a police motorbike magazine. He was trying to persuade me that this would open up a huge market for me. The trouble was his readership, retired police motorcycle riders, wasn’t who I was marketing to. He was very, very pushy but it just didn’t fit with the profile of my ideal client.
Conclusion
Wherever you choose to advertise, make sure you track how effective it is. If you can’t attribute a single sale to an advert with 100% confidence that that was the source of the business it’s not working. When it comes to be time to renew you need to understand whether its the advert or the publication/directory that needs changing.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree or disagree with what I’ve written? Do you have a success or disaster you’d like to share (no naming please)? If so leave a comment and let me know.
