7 Advertising Mistakes Most Small and Local Businesses Make

Advertising is crucial to the most small businesses, particularly small retail and restaurant establishments vying for the attention of consumers in medium to large size markets. And yet, most small businesses don't understand how to advertise effectively. There are many common mistakes that small businesses make in their advertising. Here we're going to take a look at seven of the most common mistakes that I witness on a nearly daily basis.Mistake Number 1: Advertising to Everyone. By making your advertising message broad, and trying to reach anyone and every who sees it, you are actually marketing to no one. Solution: Target your message to a subset of the population, and your advertising will resonate with them more effectively, because they identify with what your business is about.Mistake Number 2: Not understanding the true value of the customer. Most businesses look at the cost of advertising and think they need to recoup that full investment from the direct response of the ad. Instead, they don't recognize that new customers who come to them from an ad have a lifetime value that is greater than the revenue of their initial purchase. Solution: Recognize that customers have a lifetime value, and position your ads and business to maximize repeat purchases.Mistake Number 3: Focusing on one format of advertising. The fact is that your prospects need repeat exposure to your message before they remember seeing it. Studies suggest that, depending on your industry, you need to have your ad seen between 3 and 12 times before it is effective. And if you only restrict your advertising to one format or one medium, you are missing out on the opportunity to be seen more often. Solution: Diversify your advertising across multiple formats.Mistake Number 4: Creating weak ads. If you don't have a great message or a compelling looking ad, people will not notice it. Ads need to make an impact in order to be noticed, and if you have a weak ad, you are simply throwing money away. Solution: Look for ads that make an impact on you, and emulate their structure.


Mistake Number 5: Having a weak landing page. If you are advertising online, and sending people to your website, be sure you send them to a relevant page that's congruent with the ad. And that page needs to be effective at telling the prospect what they need to do next in order to buy from you. Solution: Make sure you are sending your internet traffic to the right place on your website with a purposeful landing page.Mistake Number 6: Cutting back when times are slow. If you are not doing enough business, that's the absolute wrong time to cut back on advertising, which, after all is a vital tool in generating more business. Solution: Budget advertising as one of your business's regular and necessary investments in order to remain relevant and grow.Mistake Number 7: Not capturing your leads and following up. If you are sending visitors to your website, chances are they won't buy right away. By capturing the leads who come to your site, however, you have the opportunity to develop a relationship with them and educate them about doing business with you. This approach builds trust, and results in much higher conversions of visitors to buyers. Solution: Create a lead capture and follow up system on your website.As you can see, nothing on the above list is all that difficult to put in place. By simply recognizing and avoiding these mistakes, you can put your business advertising in position to thrive. If you want more details on how to fix your advertising and build more effective campaigns, visit Baer On Marketing to download my free report on better advertising practices.