What is your most effective advertising?

[tragu]

Hello,

I think it would be useful for all business owners to know the most effective advertising tool of each other.

So far, Google Adwords (www.adwords.google.com) has been the most effective advertising tool for me. I use Adwords to drive traffic to my website. What I like about Adwords is that you can laser-target your prospects. Furthermore, you can track so many things, which I won't go into details here.

However, there is a steep learning curve in using Adwords. If you plan to use it, read all the information available on the web before spending significant money on it.

I'm looking forward to know your most effective advertising tool/medium.

Best regards,
Thuva

[babysham]

Word of mouth.

[intrepidia]

for one of my businesses, I used Wilds (or street posters. 11 * 17 full colour posters and had a high school student put them up.... Worked great for local market.... (I was in the prepaid home telephone game)

Cheers
Intrepidia

[shellysoda]

Mine has been word of mouth as well. We've also been in a few magazines (in feature articles) and that has brought in quite a few new customers as well. I've heard both good and bad things about adwords but if it works for you that's fantastic! Marketing is tricky stuff, lol :)

[ranny3]

Flyers in the mail, old school but actually works. We had a client starting out a Tax/Business Consulting service. She ended up sending out 50 000 flyers in mailboxes around the city around tax time (Feb/March) - very effective in getting new customers especially since many ppl have taxes in their minds around that time.

She was able to pay the guys that send out 'publi-sac' and have them put in peoples mailboxes.

[GroceryBagHead]

I put mine is forum signatures and hope for the best :)
Actually I don't have any experience with it, so I'm going to follow this thread for while.

[1234PENS]

I would say Promotional Products! :D

Give away a pen or a keychain with your company name & logo on it. People love free stuff.

www.masalpromo.com / www.1234PENS.com

[Derek]

Word of mouth for sure would be the most effective for us probably followed by PR which is also another form of word of mouth.

[meatpie77]

Word of mouth works best for me, but it can take some time to get going.

I recently tried a very small run of 200 flyers just in my neighborhood. I got 3 calls: 1 new customer, 1 pyramid scheme recruiter, and 1 super weird creepy guy who had a business proposition for me that he couldn't talk about over the phone... which didn't sound like it was completely illegal until I thought about it for about one second.

I think I'll stick with word of mouth.

[angiek]

I work for a small business and I have found that word of mouth is the best.
Second best is if you can get an article about your business in your local community newspaper. Something about grand opening or new line in store.
It is pretty effective if your clientelle are living where your business is.
We had a jewerlley store open up here and somehow about every three months there was an article about his store in the community paper, he got so many new customers out of that. Unfortunately he was scamming them and many people lost their rings and stuff. But because he was in the newspaper people trusted him right away. It was free advertising for him because it was community events, he did not have to pay anything for this.
Promotional products are a hit and miss. It is good to give it to your clients but for new clients it doesn't always work unless it is a new type of gimmick product that people have a use for like a small camera memory card or a USB attache, but that is getting very expensive and you need alot of them.
As for pens, we are so used to having something written on a pen that no one really reads it anymore. Again good to remind your clients about you but for new clients hit and miss.
Giving a discount is another good one especially if the customer is caught off guard and didn't expect one. Nothing travells faster than a discount you did not have to scam or fight for.

These are basically only good if your clients are living where your business is.

[Canucklehead]

Wife is a lawyer - and 100% of her business is due to word of mouth. She has never advertised (8 years now) but seems to be busy. Not as busy as I'D like her to be hehehe.....

Pretty simple philosophy: treat customers/clients like you would like to be treated.

[sharkyJay]

I've been studying, researching, and doing a lot of marketing in the last couple of years. Once you really understand advertising most concepts are very simple. But there are so many areas to think about that it may seem complicated.

Too keep it short I'll give my perspective on some of the ideas talked about so far.

Word of mouth.

Everyone knows this is very important. Almost all businesses I talked to say this is the most effective. Bad word of mouth can do major damages to your business too. It's like Karma, treat your customers good and it'll come bad to you. This is so successful because of the 'medium is the message' concept (more on this below).

for one of my businesses, I used Wilds (or street posters

In this case posters worked great because the customer is exposed to the message several times. One poster at each corner or poll closed to each other. As the times they see your message increases the chances of them remembering you and considering your service increases exponentially. This concept also explains:


I recently tried a very small run of 200 flyers just in my neighborhood. I got 3 calls...

The customer is only exposed to your message once. If you did the flyers to the exact 200 places over and over again, you will see exponential results each time. But depending on your business I would probably say 200 is most likely not enough.

From experience I find that most flyers done by a business (even ones that have it 'professionally' done) is not effective. Professional Copywriting (persuasive style of writing for advertising) was not use.


We had a jewerlley store open up here and somehow about every three months there was an article about his store in the community paper, he got so many new customers out of that.

Once last thing. As Angiek's showed, medium is the message. Even advertising in the newspaper next to the editorial is more trusted than most other advertising. This is why yellow flyers on car windshields don't work. One is that it is not viewed a trustworthy source (newspaper = trustworthy) and two people subconsciously associate it with the negativity of parking tickets.

I hope this helps other businesses do better advertising/marketing.

[BobW]

Word of mouth is everything. Yellow pages work well for me as well, although they are quite expensive and keep jacking their rates :(

Signage on my vehicle generates lots of calls as well.

I did a newspaper ad once... all it gets is tirekickers; basically people too lazy to grab a phonebook. Wouldn't do that again.

Tried the signs in boulevards once as well. No response at all on them.

[sharkyJay]

Which method works also depends on your business. No one method will be as effective for all.

So tell us the type of business you have.

[meatpie77]

The customer is only exposed to your message once. If you did the flyers to the exact 200 places over and over again, you will see exponential results each time. But depending on your business I would probably say 200 is most likely not enough.


You're right, of course -- however, I was trying to emphasize the point that if you do any kind of mass-marketing, on any scale, you will probably get a few strange calls from con artists, opportunists, and just plain wacko's. The person that attempted to recruit me into a Pyramid Scheme wasn't successful, obviously, but it made me nervous about answering my phone for the rest of the day, and it raised my "Personal Homeland Security" meter up to Condition Red for a week or so.

This was just a scenario I didn't expect to encounter, and from my experience I think I'll just stick with word-of-mouth marketing in the future.

PS - the one customer I did get out of it, tho, has called me to work for her 3 times in the past month, and will most likely tell all her friends and colleagues about me. I'm pretty happy about that.

[wheel]

My absolute best form of advertising is Google adwords. And I work it like the dickens, spending a third to a quarter per click what others in my industry do. As another posted noted above, you need to do your research on this to be successful - but if you do it's a gold mine. For the best ebook on adwords, Google 'andrew goodman'. He's at pagezero media which is a Toronto company, but he's renowned internationally as an adwords expert.

Also as noted above, with adwords you can laser target your prospects and customers. Traditional print media smears your ad in front of the general population. With adwords, you only show your ad to people looking for your product. Very effective.

I also get word of mouth, but only rarely. These types of leads turn into sales almost 100% of the time but are very low volume so I don't spend any time trying to increase this.

I do well in the search engines, that helps a bit.

I've tried industry magazines. Spent thousands on ads, never made a sale. Bleh :).

I've done a bit of reading on car ads. That sounds promising, I'm apt to be trying that this year or next.

[hamidrizvi]

Depends on the kind of business you are in. Passive advertising methods such as flyers, decals on car windows, catalogues, etc might work well, but at the same time usually have a very low response rate. I have seen a lot of business operaters use passive methods and give up after some time thinking that their business was at fault.

The best way to get word out and create hype about your business is using Active advertising, e.g. Going out and telling people yourself about the business. This gets the people more involved and interested. Obviously, you will not get to as large a audience as you would with passive advertising but you are more likely to have a higher response rate.

[TheLegace]

What kinda of marketing do you suggest for Web Designers, I am going to start one soon, I was hoping for some tips.

Thanx

[wheel]

What kinda of marketing do you suggest for Web Designers, I am going to start one soon, I was hoping for some tips.

Thanx
Likely your best bet is referrals. Web design is tough work from a prospecting viewpoint. There's a million of them out there plus you're competing with $3.95 hosting and $29.95 templates, and the business owner's 16 year old neighbour, etc. Free work for charities and non-profits, that kind of thing.

You might also try adwords advertising on Google, but I expect it's a tough market.

[Canucklehead]

There are also sites where you can bid on projects. Aside from the potential to actually GET some work that way, having your website listed allows people to browse through your work - FREE advertising!

Incorporating your message (web design) into every piece of communication that you do will also increase exposure to your services. Avatars, email signatures, Skype addresses, MSN, voicemail, etc.

Wheels' suggestion of free work is great. Some specific examples would be lion's club and local united way agencies. Read the community meetings section of your local newspaper and offer up your services. Do it for free on favorville (http://www.favorville.com) and build up your portfolio.

A lot of local flyers that I get include web addresses - many are crap. Go to the website, if it's crap, see what you would do to change it and send it to the advertiser. You never know - they might call you to help them with their website. If not, it still keeps your creative juices flowing and who knows, you might get a referral out of it.

[cdnNick]

You can also email some web hosts that don't offer web design and see if you can partner with them referring your hosting to them and they refer design to you.

[wheel]

There are also sites where you can bid on projects.
Yeah, elance and a few others I think. I'd be careful though, I've looked at those sites previously (considered posting jobs, and sometimes to see if there's anything interesting) and the project posters are all people who's #1 priority is the lowest bid, and the bulk of the bidders you'll be up against are from countries where $1/hour is good money.

I'm tangenting into offshore vs. local, but that's going to be a big problem for anyone looking for work in this field. I've personally been offered full time experienced web developer services for $750 per month. And I know people who use these - how are you going to compete with that? Personally I use local talent because I think in most cases using overseas talent will waste too much of my time and I've seen many examples of shoddy work - but I'm the exception to the rule. Most people who see a quote come back at $500 when you know it'll take 3 weeks of your time, well, you're not going to get the job.

Tough market to be in these days. Everybody trying to save a dollar on your back.

[TheLegace]

I am grateful for the wealth on information, I was hoping it would be easier. I mean I can design pages well, at the moment I am working on building a portfilio. Using CSS, I am able to make dynamic ecommerce pages, I know a lot of HTML and slowly starting to understand PHP and Java, to make my own custom dynamic webpages. I was planning on using software for ecommerce websites like Cubecart and make custom layouts based on that. I know people, but I dont want to be local.

[Canucklehead]

... $1/hour is good money.

I'm tangenting into offshore vs. local

I've already tangented :) offshore printing, inflatables and am working on back-end programmers now. Key challenge for me has not been quality but leadtimes and minimums (printing). No experience yet on web designers - we'll see how well they can take direction.

$750/month is good but how about productivity? I guess as long as you get about 10 pages done/month you're laughin'