It’s a question I was asked recently, “Of all the ways I could advertise my business, what is the best and what is the worst?”

It’s a good question and I have some answers, but what I am about to share with you is not exactly what I told this person the other day.

See, by the time he asked me that question, we had already talked for awhile and I had an understanding of what he wanted and needed to accomplish by advertising.

If you don’t know what the end result is that you want to see, then how in the world will you know what is needed?

It’s like a question I saw on the website Quora dot com once. Someone asked what was the ideal speed to drive a car.  That’s it.  The entire question was what is the ideal speed to drive a car.  People who had too much time on their hands answered, but really there needed to be some qualifications included with the question.

Twenty miles an hour could be the ideal speed to drive a car on a very rough dirt road filled with hazards and 80 miles an hour could be the ideal speed to drive a car on a freshly built highway.

Right?

So let’s go back to the topic, What Are The Best and Worst Ways to Advertise and come up with a few guidelines.

1. Your advertising needs to reach an audience of people that are likely to be your customers. When I say audience, I am referring to the people that will see, hear, or read your ad.  And let’s define customers as people who will one day spend money with you.

Here’s a couple example of what you don’t want to do:  Run an ad for hot dogs in Vegan Life magazine. Air hearing aid commercials on a teen oriented radio station.  That’s almost as ridiculous as attempting to sell snowmobiles in Miami or Christmas trees in July.

2. Nearly every advertising medium can work, if used appropriately with realistic expectations.  While the newspaper industry has suffered tremendous losses over the past couple of decades in both readership and advertising revenue, there are still plenty of niche publications that are doing quite well.  We live in an area of specialization and niche’s can help us target the people we want to reach.

3. Commit to building name recognition, part one.  I see my counterparts at some radio stations and most television stations sell advertising programs that are attempting to reach too many people for the money spent.  A couple years ago I saw this package that offered 100 ads per month but they were scattered all over the place and with some common sense and practical reasoning, it was easy to see that it was junk.  For the same price, they should have offered 50 ads each month that reached less people but with more frequency to build name recognition.

4. Commit to building name recognition, part two.  This is where I tell you that in most cases, short term advertising is a waste.  Advertising for a week or 30 days is not going to work in most cases.  It’s not that your advertising salesperson is greedy, it’s that you might be too short sighted to see the real benefits and results that will come down the road because you can’t rush name recognition.

That’s just four and I could give you a dozen more but it’s better to really get to know the specifics of what you want to see happen before we continue.  Reach out to me and let’s start the conversation.