4 Ways To Maximize Your Advertising Budget
by Steve Casteel

Since the majority of small businesses operate with very small advertising budgets,
it is critical to ensure that your advertising dollars deliver as much value as
possible to the bottom line. Here are four tips that you can use to ensure that you
get the most bang for your advertising buck:

Target your Advertising

In an ideal world the ads you place would be seen only by customers interested in your business. In reality, you'll find most advertising opportunities won't deliver
such an ideal business proposition. The real key is to locate advertising opportunities that will target your potential customers as closely as possible. You should evaluate advertising offers, by asking yourself how closely will this hit my target audience? Could I do better?. For example,If you are advertising a website that offers a new vitamin supplement for dogs, advertising on a pet website would not be as beneficial as a dog related website. A website or newsletter on the topic of dog food and nutrition would be even more targeted, as almost 100% of the visitors to that site would have some interest in dog food and nutrition and that's exactly the audience you are looking for.

Vary Your Advertising Offers

Don't forget that your target market is comprised of certain groups, each with its own motivation to buy your product. On the dog food and nutrition website, you may encounter breeders, veterinarians, and family pet owners. They all want the same thing (a healthy happy dog) but for different reasons. The breeders want their prized stud to live a long life and have lots of puppies while the veterinarians are interested in offering the best possible advice on nutrition to their clients, and so on. When writing your ad copy, keep these different groups in mind and compose an ad that speaks to each groups buying motivations. Then rotate these ads to ensure you cover all the potential buyers for your product.

Don't Over-Commit
Many small business owners jump at the chance to buy ads at a volume discount purchasing 6 months to a year's worth of advertising up front. On the surface this may seem like a good way to maximize on your advertising dollars. However, if you've done a good job of targeting your potential customers, you may be purchasing too much advertising.

Conventional wisdom says that it takes 7 messages from a company to get the average
customer to act and actually purchase their product. As your target market becomes more effectively defined (from pet websites to dogs to dog food), the number of contacts required decreases, because you don't need to do as much convincing to motivate a potential customer to purchase your product. Your advertising dollars, therefore, would be better spent in 3 month advertising programs. After the 3 months, move to another website or magazine, and continue to rotate your ads to maximize the reach of your message.

Measure Your Results

You must track your ad responses and measure your results, or you'll never know how well your ads are performing. Tracking your response rates, primarily though the use of tracking URLs is critical. A tracking URL will still direct surfers to your site but it will also capture the site from which they came, giving you some valuable feedback on the performance of your advertising. There are numerous commercial services available to help you track the origin of your web traffic.

Off-line businesses may use coupons or offer codes to determine the success of their various advertising efforts. Something as simple as a small numerical code in the bottom right corner of an ad can determine where a customer saw your ad. This in turn will allow you to compare numbers monthly amongst your various advertising purchases and weed out those that are not generating any business for you.

Measuring ad placements, is only the beginning. You must also evaluate ad copy, timing, and layout. Your ads may have seasonal fluctuations in responses rates and your potential customers may respond differently to a change in your ad copy. So keep a detailed tracking spreadsheet to record your ad response in all of these areas. This will give you the information you need to make informed decision about your small businesses advertising budget.

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Steve Casteel is the owner and webmaster of The Online Business Center and has been
an online entrepreneur since 2001. If you would like to learn more about a Ad,
Visitor, Clicks, Actions & Sales Conversion Tracking / Split Testing Solutions visit:
http://www.sdcwebbiz.com/recommends/4-ad-tips.html
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