Strange title for a blog post in a Sales and Marketing Blog I bet you’re saying to yourself.
Read on… …
Every smart Small Business Owner should have an advertising budget each year. There are varying ways of doing this.
Some make the budget 10% of the previous years overall sales and some 10% on the projected years sales. The decision is yours, however, I prefer 10% on the projected years sales as this way advertising is viewed as a driver of future sales and spending on advertising is linked directly to meeting your future projected sales.
Whatever way you work out your budget, you need to dig deep and get value for money and look at all ways of driving hungry clients/customers to your place of business and keep them returning.
This is where you need to be a recycler.
It goes without saying that EVERY Small Business Owner needs to keep active statistics on EVERY piece of advertising that is done. Meaning you need a way of tracking, who comes to your business and from what piece of advertising, so you need to be vigilant in tracking this by asking each customer a question “How did you hear about us?”
You may see this as time consuming, tiresome and unimportant but honestly it is vital. If you are not prepared to do this, then do not advertise, as you cannot grow, what you cannot track. In fact I would go so far as to say, pack up your business and sell it, as you are not serious about making it a success.
Back to recycling, once you have tracked your advertisements over a period of time, your statics will show you which particular piece of advertising caused a big stir in your business resulting in you and your staff being run of your feet, compared to that which only caused a slight breeze that was nothing to worry about. Do you agree?
Now what you do is take that particular piece of advertising and use it again, plus –use it in a variety of other ways.
Meaning – say it was an advertisement in a newspaper – what would happen if you were to take a copy of it and mail that as part of a direct mail campaign, or turned it into an electronic coupon campaign (that way it costs you nothing except your time emailing your client/customer list). Add it to your electronic newsletter you send to your list, write an article or a press release around it and add them to your website plus submit it to article sites and press release sites – if you feel you are not qualified to write the article or press release then you can get help here (they would also be able to help if asked nicely to submit these for you)
Another thing I want to point out is that if you are not on the Internet, and do not understand how you can marketing your business very successfully to get LOCAL new and repeat business or even national and international business (If your business is set up for this) then you need help. This help can be in the form of very simple step-by-step lessons each month for a short period of time. You do need an Internet Presence as this kind of business DOES NOT TAKE A LOT OF YOUR MARKETING $$’s in fact so much of this is free.
So, are you a Recycler in your business?
Talk Later
Lyndon
P.S. Look I urge you now to go check out 2 things that I know will help your business.
(1) A Small Business Marketing Tool - this is one POWERFUL way of GROWING your business into a hugely profitable asset.
(2) My Blog Post – Trigger Happy or Just a Lazy Business Owner and get the book – your advertising $$ will be driven further with the knowledge in this book
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