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You are currently browsing the The Andrew Griffiths Blog blog archives for January, 2012.
Here is a presentation that is a combined effort from a few people, some I know (BEN VERSANG) and many I don’t. There is some wonderful wisdom here. Feel free to download it and pass it on to others. For those who weren’t there – we played this while people were arriving at the BE INSPIRED event recently.
Hello to all visitors to my BLOG. I get asked by a lot of small business owners if I would be prepared to put together a forum where business owners could get together and share information, solve problems, support one another and generally interact. I think this is a great idea, as long it is easy to use, not filled with junk and that people actually are participating.
Could anyone who is interested perhaps take a moment to give me some feedback about this idea? Particularly what you would like to see on a site like this and what kind of topics would you like covered. I will of course provide my own input and invite other people to do likewise. If you think it is a good idea – we will do it.
Many thanks for your support, and your comments on my blog. I always welcome feedback, comments and suggestions to make it better. A lot of people visit this blog even if they don’t make comments. All information shared will help others.
“Trying is lying. There is no such thing as trying. You do it or you don’t. You get results in life or you have excuses why you didn’t. When people say, ’I'll try,’ they usually mean, ‘I’m not going to do it now.”
— Dick Sutphen: Psychic researcher and author and speaker on hypnotherapy
This is a question that I get asked all of the time normally from people who are skeptical about the benefits of advertising. I have to say unequivocally that yes, advertising does work, but it is not an exact science and more often than not, it is a matter of trial and error.
Now I know that this does not inspire a lot of confidence in the advertising process however, like all forms of marketing, the more information you have and the more time and energy that you put into your advertising, that is researching it, thinking about what you are going to advertise and so on, the greater the results will be.
From my own experience I see a lot of businesses dabble in the field of advertising. After running one advertisement in a newspaper that doesn’t produce the expected results they make sweeping statements like “newspaper advertising doesn’t work”. Of course, newspaper advertising does work but it depends on a number of factors. For example what is the advertisement like (as in is it really busy and cluttered or does it sell on simple and clear message), where is it placed in the newspaper, what is the product or service being advertised and what are the other outside influences that could affect the results?
More often than not, businesses don’t really have good monitoring systems in place to determine where new customers are coming from, making it virtually impossible to determine if advertising has worked or not.
Another common problem with advertising is that many business owners have unrealistic expectations on the return from their advertising. For a couple of hundred dollars they expect the advertising to return tens of thousands of dollars. This just doesn’t happen. If it was that easy every small business owner would be a multi millionaire.
I have been involved a lot of businesses that have started their advertising with some trepidation. I have watched them slowly build their businesses with smart and effective advertising to the point where they have grown into large corporations that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on advertising.
So in answering the question posed, does advertising really work, the answer is yes it most certainly does, but the key’s are how you advertise, where you advertise and what you say in your advertising.
I will be spending the next few weeks looking at various forms of advertising and what you can do to increase your chances of making advertising work for you.
Andrew Griffiths