Slash your advertising by 80% and use the savings to grow your business!

The Big Lie: “Advertising, marketing & sales are all a numbers game”

False! Most companies treat it like a numbers game, but “most companies” fail within two years. When done properly, those numbers can be analysed, refined and predicted. You should be able to look every advertising sales rep in the eye and tell her what your current return on investment is from your existing ads, and explain exactly what response you demand if they want your business–and require that level of performance for payment.

Smaller lies:

“The customers have all disappeared” False! Money is going to be tight for a lot longer than wall street thinks, but the customers are still around.

“Most businesses that fail, do so because they are under capitalised” False! If they successfully opened for business, they had enough capital. Almost all business failures are because they didn’t have enough customers.

“Service industries are immune from these leaner times” False! The same information revolution that has decimated hometown retail is currently sucking all the cash out of the service industries as well. Your customers are going on-line and learning how to fix their own appliances, cars and office equipment. The easy, high mark-up services are vanishing, leaving service professionals to make a living doing the more difficult jobs.

And the sad truth:

“It will never be the same again” True! The ways people shop has changed, not because of the economy (though the economy did speed-up and intensify the process of change), but because of the ease of doing comparison shopping these days. The days of “whatever the market will bear” has gone. From now on you’re going to have to earn whatever you get–let’s start with getting you more customers!.

It wasn’t very long ago that a local company could attract customers by taking-out an ad in the local newspaper or yellow pages. For some of us those days feel like just last week. But if you’ve been panicking over the slowing economy for the last few years, you’re not alone. Sadly you have lots of fellow business owners to commiserate with.

Many business made the wrong marketing choice at the beginning of the recession, stopping promoting their business in order to conserve cash. That was the worst mistake they could make. All you have to do is look around and see how many companies right here in town have closed recently, and you will see the results of conserving your marketing budget during the hard times. You, however, survived. Congratulations!

Since the hard-times lasted longer than most people thought, many businesses have started plowing new hand-fulls of cash into ad campaigns recently. Most are finding the results, well, confusing. The advertising isn’t getting the phone to ring as much as it used to. And the customers are different too:

• They don’t want to come into the store

• They price shop more than ever

• They’re far more likely order from out-of-state, increasingly online.

• They expect you to diagnose their service problem over the phone, or by email; and tell them how to fix it themselves.

How are you supposed to make a living like this? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about.