Advertising can be viewed as extremely risky for small businesses that don’t have a massive budget each month. It doesn’t have to be that way- as long as you test and measure all of your advertising. Follow the below steps to ensure you don’t waste your precious cash flow on advertising that doesn’t work.

1) First, ensure you have mapped out your target market, and you’ve found an advertising medium that will get your message right in front of them.

2) Ask everyone the question “Where did you hear about us?” Make it compulsory on a newsletter subscription, or on a booking form, or an order form. If someone rings up to enquire about something, ask “By the way, can you tell me where you found us?” I’ve never had someone say no to that question. Keep it in a spreadsheet, or database, but make sure you’ve recorded it. Get your receptionist or staff members to ask it as well.

3) Ensure you have a good internet statistics system. This will tell you when visitors are coming from another website, and the exact page they came from. If you don’t have any statistics being recorded- start now!!

4) Once you know where a good % of your visitors are coming from, you can start looking into the marketing that works. If after a month of asking everyone where they heard about you and not one came from your yellow pages ad, you can either improve your advert, or put the money into testing something else.

5) Run with the ones that are working. By this I mean you pay $200 for the advert, and it brings in $500 profit. Simply increase this type of advertising. Whether it is dropping flyers- do double the amount. Or a banner advert on a website- look at what other options they have, or run the banner more often.

6) Lastly, check your conversion rate. After you have noted down where everyone is coming from, work out if they are buying?? You may be getting visitors, but are they turning into profitable customers? If not, start looking into increasing your conversion rate.

Remember, advertising should only achieve 1 of 2 things- either the offer you make is so enticing that it turns first time visitors into buyers or getting visitors into your database so that you can sell to them later.

Emma Rhoades owns advertising business Diva Promotions. She aims to give women with their own micro business highly targeted, cost-effective advertising campaigns. Visit www.divapromotions.com.au today to book into your next campaign and start growing your business! Emma can be contacted via the website, admin@divapromotions.com.au or 1300 76 36 76.

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