During a recent phone conversation with my client Bob, I asked him what was and wasn’t working with his small business marketing. His response was instantaneous.
He said, ‘My ads aren’t working. Each month I’m paying $500 to run an ad in an online publication read by my target market. Last month I only got 21 clicks to my site from the ad!’
Bob was paying almost $24 a lead and not getting very many of them. He was right to be upset with the response he was getting. He went on to say that it probably wasn’t worth spending money on advertising; that it just didn’t work.
Have you ever spent $500 or more on an ad and gotten a similarly limited response? Have you ever felt discouraged about your advertising campaign and the lack of results?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, you’re not alone. Everyone who has ever advertised has run an ad that failed at least once. Doing it once is educational; running an ad that isn’t working a second time is throwing good money after bad.
If you run an ad and get hardly any responses, running it again and again isn’t going to make it work any better. It’s like trying to pedal a bicycle with a flat tire. You get on the bike and it takes great effort to go a short distance. Is pedaling harder and harder the solution? Of course not.
If your bike had a flat you’d change the tire and get moving. If your ads aren’t working, rethink and rewrite them and you’ll start attracting more clients.
Are you still guessing at what marketing copy and layout gets the best response?
I had one client who was struggling to attract new clients with his ads. Each week he was spending money advertising his property management business in three local papers and getting zero response.
His ad was all about his company instead of about his prospects’ problems. I showed him how to rewrite his ad focusing on his prospects’ biggest concerns. He started running the new ad and within the first three weeks he added nine new clients worth close to two hundred thousand dollars. He’s still running the ad and his phone is still ringing off the hook.
Are you writing your own marketing copy or supervising the person who is? Not sure how to get your prospects’ attention?
You may be an expert in your business and provide the highest quality services, but knowing which words will grab your prospects and get them to contact you can be be puzzling. Frankly, even the professionals in advertising don’t know for sure.
Fortunately the Internet gives advertisers a unique advantage. You can try out different ads and different wording in your ads and test the market response at a very low cost. Google’s Adwords makes this possible.
When I initially told Bob about trying Google Adwords’ pay-per-click advertising, he was apprehensive. His concern was that it would cost too much, that was until he understood the math.
Bob was paying $500 a month for advertising that was attracting 21 to 40 prospects. With pay-per-click advertising, you pay only when a prospect clicks through to your site. If you set the maximum you’ll pay-per-click at 25 cents, for each $500 you spend, you’ll get 2,000 prospects.
Not convinced?
One of the biggest benefits of using Google Adwords is that you can test a handful of ads. Whether you want to test an ad you plan to run in print or you want to find out which book title will pull the best, you can use Google Adwords to show you what your prospects respond to. Within a week and for a cost of $100 or less you can discover which keywords your target market searches for the most frequently and which ad headline gets the best response.
The first step is to setup a Google Adwords ad account and create an ad. After at least 25 people have clicked on your ad, you’ll have a good idea of how well it is working and how it compares to your other ads. It’s like having your own market research firm working for you and costs hundreds instead of tens of thousands of dollars.
Wishing, hoping and guessing have no place in your small business marketing. Don’t keep running ads that aren’t generating leads. Stop guessing at which ads your prospects will respond to. Write client-focused ads and test them. You’ll end up with advertising that works and your phone will be ringing off the hook with new business too.
Ready to start earning 2 to 10 times as much with your web site? You can when you know what information to give your prospects to grab their attention and convince them to buy.
You’ll find out exactly what to do, including a detailed explanation of how to set up your Google Adwords campaigns in Creating Web Sites that Sell. Use this link >>
