PART 4 - BRANDING VS. ADVERTISING

As a follow-up to our last post on whether branding or advertising is better choice for you and your business.

Obviously, one thing worth mentioning is the answer might also be dependent on your business type, the product or service you carry, etc.

Some products or services only take one ad for the advertiser to start realizing an immediate return (i.e. customer purchases or interest) whereas in some cases it may take multiple ads to simply build trust.

For instance, we had a customer who was only going to go with one ad in our publication and then wait to measure the response.

Unfortunately, this is something we hear very often - the problem would have been if he waited three months and discovered that it was a good medium to use, he would lose any momenteum built from the first ad placement and would have to start over anyway.

We (he and I) had a discussion about this and he decided to go with at least one more follow-up ad and I'm happy to report he messaged me within a couple of days of the initial article / ad coming out to let me know that he had enough return revenue on the initial ad to pay for the initial ad and the upcoming ad, and he had multiple inquiries from customers who didn't know of his company before the ad / article.

The best part is that no matter how many more sales he makes from either of these two ads, he is still getting the additional value of building his brand for the time when new potential customers need his product or service.

That is the power of branding:
Whether a customer buys now or later as a result of seeing your ad or company name, seeing your company name multiple times adds a trust factor that often isn't valued enough in relation to the cost of purchasing the advertisement.

Let's face it, everytime someone sees your company name, whether or not they purchase or act right away, you are building potential future sales.

In my research of more than 30 issues of Island Business News, my previous newspaper Alternative Careers (plus my time working for other publications), and in 8 years of helping people become a brand and/or companies grow their brand, this has proven to be accurate more often than.

As such, I still stand by my belief that one is better to place 5 small ads than 1 large one if there budget will only allow 1 large or 5 small, because as they say, it takes 5 nos in sales to get 1 yes (and in my opinion marketing is often similar unless your 1 ad is perfect in every respect and you either reach your customer when they are looking or you 1 ad somehow creates a need that the customer didn't even know they had) and so if you only appear 1 time in a certain medium you may be only getting the customers who have already said no internally 4 times already or your ad is so fantastic it encourages them to ignore the first 4 nos, which is very rare in my experience.

Long story short, if you'd like to know whether Branding or Advertising (or both) is best for your business, perhaps it may be better to place multiple smaller ads than just one larger ad and then measure the result.

At least then you will have a true picture of which will work best (and even which medium will work best) for you and your business.

Until Next Time,
CP for IBN