A lot of small business owners spend a lot of money on advertising. Often with pretty poor results. So, I put this together to help you avoid the most common advertising mistakes.
Here they are in no particular order.
- You’re using brand advertising [ads that contain no obvious call to action], when you should be using direct response advertising [ads that contain a direct call to action]. Almost all small businesses should use direct response.
- You’re advertising on a platform your prospects don’t use / don’t pay attention to.
- Your advertising is online, when it should be in print media [or the other way round].
- You’re buying advertising on platforms that people don’t trust, rather than advertising on highly trusted websites, podcasts, etc.
- You’re advertising at the wrong time in your prospective client’s [or customer’s] buying cycle.
- You’re advertising to get maximum clickthroughs, rather than targeted clickthroughs from actual prospects.
- Your advertisements are not written by a proven copywriter.
- You’re advertising a product or service, which people prefer to buy via the recommendation of a friend.
- Your advertisements are bought based on what they cost, rather than their potential effectiveness.
- Your advertisements are in places where lots of your competitors are advertising.
There are lots more common reasons why advertising doesn’t work.
For example, your advertising message is irrelevant to your target prospect, or it’s lacking in targeted motivation, or it points to a poorly converting landing page, or it points to a landing page that loads too slowly, or the special whatever you’re offering isn’t as special as you think, or it explains too much, or it sounds too similar to an advertisement they’ve already clicked on, or it sounds too good to be true, or your target prospects are privacy conscious and your website requires cookies, or you are not bidding for your advertisements correctly, or your advertisement is reaching just a fraction of the number of people you think it is… seriously, I could go on and on, but you get the drift.
In most cases, small and medium-sized business advertising makes lots of these mistakes simultaneously. These mistakes are more damaging than the individual damage each one causes.
That’s because they compound together. Think of compound interest, but working in reverse.
Do you even need paid advertisements?
For many small and medium-sized businesses, their biggest advertising mistake is that they’re buying them in the first place! I don’t buy advertisements. My clients have no need to buy them either. It’s an increasingly expensive, complex game. And you don’t need to play. It’s just one form of marketing.
I hope you found this useful, my friend.