A recent conversation highlighted how important it is that you understand the advertising media you use and how easy it can be to waste a lot of money if you don’t think carefully about the basics:

Let me explain…

 

Every week I visit a local beauty therapist for a relaxation massage, in an attempt to keep my dodgy back flexible and sooth away the stresses of running my own business.  The week before last the therapist told me she’d decided to advertise on the local radio station having attended one of their free presentations a few weeks earlier.

 

This particular beauty therapist is a highly qualified professional, she works 6 days a week, including some evenings, from her home based studio and most of her clients are local, travelling no more than a few miles for their treatments.

 

Not being able to resist my usual business questions I asked why she was advertising and why she’d chosen to use the radio.  Her responses were interesting in that they echoed the answers I often get from prospective clients when I first start working with them.

 

She’d decided to advertise because she has capacity, especially during the daytime when sometimes she could have 3 or 4 hour gaps between clients.  When we talked further I also found out that she’d decided she wanted a higher income from her business and that certain work (massages for example where material costs were a few pence for massage oil) were more lucrative than other services (ie facials, where material costs can be up to a third of the amount the client is charged).

 

Her reason for choosing radio was purely circumstantial.  She’d been sent an invite to a presentation being organised by a local radio station with an offer designed to appeal to small businesses.  The local station was one she listened to and was therefore familiar with and they were offering ‘prime time’ ad slots.  Using their expertise they would help her to write an advert and they’d record it professionally.  Then all she’d have to do is pay the agreed amount by direct debit, monthly for 12 months, totalling over £4,000, and she’d have an advertising campaign for the whole year.  The problem was radio was completely the wrong medium for this particular business.

 

Let’s revisit the facts…

 

Radio can certainly help to get a message out.  It gives the opportunity to expose that message to large numbers of people, although how many will hear it and notice it will be dependent on a number of factors including the frequency and timing of your ad as well as the relevance of your message.

 

The beauty therapist’s message however hadn’t yet been clearly defined.  She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to promote a special offer on some or all treatments, whether she was focusing on one particular treatment or whether she was trying to trade on her existing reputation for a professional, local service.  The enthusiastic sales team had convinced her that an advert simply listing her treatments might be enough.  This might have been the case for another business, but it wasn’t true for this one.

 

Having chatted for the first half hour of my treatment the therapist drew her own conclusions about radio advertising.  We talked about who her existing clients were (a combination of mothers with young children, treating themselves; professionals like myself using the treatments as a de-stress mechanism and people planning for big events where they wanted to look their best – weddings, anniversaries and holidays).  The common factor was location.  They tended to live or work in or near the village where she had her studio and convenience was a big factor.  We also talked about what had attracted clients in the first place and I discovered that many (like myself) had responded to a flyer pushed through their door or been recommended by a friend.

 

The location factor alone made radio wasteful in the extreme.  The adverts would have been broadcast to literally thousands of people 10, 20, 30 miles away.  If these people were willing to travel she was in danger of generating more demand than she could service.  And £4,000 was a hell of a lot of money for such a small business to invest in an untested advertising medium.

 

Whilst this example is for a very small business with modest goals, the issues faced are the same for all small companies and business professionals.  Very often I’m approached by people who say they want help advertising their business when in reality they really need help with marketing.  The distinction being that marketing will address not only your message, the size, location and interests of your target audience and what makes you different but will also consider how you price and present your products and services and through which channels you might sell (online, through partnerships as well as direct sales).  Only once you’ve answered some of these questions can you decide effectively where to advertise.

 

In the case of my beauty therapist, with a bit of prompting from yours truly, she decided to pull out of the radio advertising (luckily she hadn’t signed a contract) and instead advertise in the local parish magazine, changing the advert monthly to promote different treatments and make seasonal offers, do a leaflet drop to all houses in three local villages and set up a database of existing clients so that she could keep track of how frequently they visit and keep them informed about new treatments and special offers.  Instead of £4,000 expenditure she was looking at a few hundred pounds to reprint her existing flyer and simply talking to existing customers about the database she was setting up is resulting in repeat bookings and referrals.

 

No doubt your business is more complex and faces different challenges but many of the fundamental issues will be similar and talking things through with someone independent can be invaluable.

 

At the Business Start-up Exhibition at the NEC last week in Sir John Harvey-Jones said: “Every small business needs a business mentor, someone who’s trusted, blunt and uses their brain.”  This really struck a chord with me.  I know my small business clients trust me, they regularly call me for advice on all sorts of things, not just marketing.  My husband says I can, on occasion, be too blunt but in business you need someone advising you who’s not afraid to tell it like it is.

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