The two kinds of advertising, and which one is best for your businesses

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I don’t know which half…”- Lord Leverhulme, founder of Unilever

It’s been almost 100 years since Lord Leverhulme made his famous pronouncement, and its logic has remained unchallenged. Until now…

For most small businesses, marketing amounts to one thing: placing advertisements in trade journals, the local and national press and Yellow Pages, billboards, etc.

Yet during the course of my copywriting work, I rarely encounter a small business owner who is able to quantify with any accuracy the return on their advertising. They vaguely intuit that if they didn’t advertise alongside their competitors, they would get left out of the race – which may or may not be true.

If I question the logic behind this strategy, the usual response is along the lines of, “Well I’ve got to get the message out there and build the company’s profile”. Now on one level this is correct, but by and large it only applies to the few: large corporations with a business to consumer client base, where brand awareness is a vital element of maintaining market share.

Brand advertisements are conceived at huge expense by big city ad agencies, and yet nobody knows for certain the effectiveness of a particular ad. OK, the marketing departments’ stats people have clever ways of quantifying market trends as they pan out during a particular campaign, but no one can tell for certain whether X, Y or Z customer bought a new pair of Nikes as a result of the latest ultra-cool ad campaign, or whether they’d have bought them regardless.

One thing the big global brands can be certain of, however, is that if they fail to keep their name creatively at the forefront of the public consciousness their market share will suffer.

But while this may be true for the likes of Nike, Coca Cola and L’Oreal, there is no mileage in small businesses squandering their fragile marketing budgets by following the lead of the big B2C brands.

Confusing brand advertising with direct response advertising is one of the main reasons why so many smaller businesses waste their fragile marketing budgets.

Direct response is the only cost-effective method of marketing a small business. If you aren’t already doing so, consider putting in place a revised marketing strategy that incorporates the following:

Scale back reliance on conventional advertising, unless you are able to demonstrate that it brings in a measurable ROI. Instead, concentrate your resources on low-cost, quantifiable direct response strategies, such as pay-per-click, telemarketing, email marketing, newsletter and article marketing, search engine marketing and direct mail. The idea is to arrive at a balanced mix of outbound and inbound marketing that supplies your sales funnel with a steady stream of prequalified leads.