It Pays To Advertise

I’m a big fan of guerrilla marketing. I think that marketers should be using all of the most effective channels available to them to put their products and services in front of leads.

There are so many of those channels now, and so many of them cost so little.

Building a website? Free.

Writing tweets? Free

Build a Squidoo page? Free too.

Facebook fan page? Won’t cost you a dime.

Media interviews, networking, word-of-mouth, list-building… all of them hugely powerful, a vital part of any successful business and completely free.

And yet I pay for advertising. I do that for one reason.

It works.

There’s a reason that the advertising industry is so big, a reason that companies even as well-known as Apple spend millions on television spots and billboard ads. Advertising pays.

Yes, advertising costs too, which is why you have to do it carefully.

Some advertising, like AdWords, Facebook’s ads and Apple’s new iAds, allows advertisers to track exactly what happens to each dollar. You can see how many people respond to the ad with interest and understand how many of those people actually buy.

You can test different ad copy and follow the results so that you can be sure you’re getting the full value for your money. You can figure everything out so precisely that you know exactly how much you’re paying for each purchase. As long as that’s less than each buyer is paying, you’re in profit. Advertising stops costing and starts paying.

Other forms of advertising though, such as television ads, billboards and print magazines, are much harder to track. They’re about building awareness, spreading a name beyond the areas a marketer can reach through most free channels. They might not lead to direct, immediate, measurable sales in the way that a special offer inserted into a newsletter will, but they do work too. If they didn’t work, big companies wouldn’t use them and bookstore magazine racks wouldn’t stock much more than dust and one-page pamphlets.

That doesn’t mean that you have to run out and book a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl. Paid advertising isn’t always cheap and it’s not the best option for small businesses with limited budgets. But it is an option. Don’t rule it out just because there are so many free channels to use as well.