How to Avoid Losing Advertising Money

The way you lose advertising money is by not having a plan and letting ad agencies come in and make decisions for you or making decisions on what an ad rep happens to tell you that day. I see it happen every day and this is a big mistake. Many businesses follow what the Yellow Pages advertising rep tells them to do and, quite honestly, most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. Even if you do good ads that get responses, not boring ones that just try to build the image or get your image out there, you still need to have a plan and that’s part of your marketing plan. You can’t just wait around for the next ad rep to come around and tell you how to put together a newsletter or Yellow Page ad or brochure. You’ll be another victim of wasted advertising. They will tell you to do what everybody else is doing. If you look in the Yellow Pages, you’ll see that everyone looks the same and most of them aren’t getting the response they want. That stuff just doesn’t work. Everyone has tried it over and over again, and it fails over and over again. They get nervous if you say, “Let’s put a number in there and check our response”, because it’s not traditional advertising that they’re used to and they also know it will convince you not to continue doing what they asked you to do. They’ll tell you it won’t work. They’ll tell you it’s non-traditional. They’ll tell you anything so you won’t use direct response advertising. Why do they tell you this? Because it will tell you the results of their advertising. The results will show that it doesn’t work. Don’t listen to them. Direct response advertising works. What you don’t want to do is, after it works and they come back to you, don’t spend the time saying, “I told you so.” Don’t convince them that direct response or your Yellow Page ad, newsletter or sales letter worked, because if you succeed in convincing them that it works, they will tell your competitors and try to sell everyone on it so they too will be successful and the ad rep will garner more business. Just tell them, “It’s working okay.” Some places will even raise your prices if your advertising is working better. Just be lukewarm about it. Continue running the ad if it’s working great. They won’t figure it out. They’ll just think you’re crazy and wasting your money because that’s what everyone is doing - running ads without help. So, let them think what they want, but don’t be an advertising victim.

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