Looking back over 2010’s marketing to see what worked and what didn’t work for Ape Red Media throws up some interesting (but maybe slightly predictable) results and reminds the business of one or two basic principles that should never be forgotten.
Advertising, often a touchy subject for a lot of businesses, after having forked out a small fortune and perceivably got little result from some all singing all dancing ad medium heavily promoted by a telesales person who could sell ice to Eskimos.
But is all advertising bad? Does advertising work? What is advertising exactly?
I love the phrase bandied about by a direct marketer who shall remain nameless on this blog, he doesn’t need any further promotion. His Phrase? Advertising doesn’t work, but ADVERTISING DOES WORK!
What I take from this phrase, or how I choose to interpret it, can be described as three principles, and following these three principles has been rather effective for Ape Red Media through 2010**. But not wishing to bore you quite yet I’ll start with the key ad mediums and their results for 2010 in our local area.
‘Stimulative’ Advertising*
We have appeared in only one ‘stimulative’ advertising medium in 2010 and they were the Romsey Gazette, The Totton Gazette and the Eastleigh Gazette. The results were very pleasing (if not surprising) and we received enquiries and work from each issue.
The return on investment, taking into consideration the ongoing value of a new client for an average of 12 months, was reasonable. The total return will be 840% or 8.4 times what was spent on the ads. At worst, should those new clients cease to use our services next week the total return on investment would be 560%.
The results highlight 2 clear points for Ape Red Media, the Gazettes provide a great return on advertising spend, the reason for which is a subject in itself. Secondly the reminder that measurement is key. If we hadn’t kept track of where the work came from, how much the initial income from all jobs related to advertising spend, we wouldn’t have been able to identify the Gazette as a profitable advertising medium to be maintained.
Directive Advertising*
We utilised 4 channels of directive advertising in 2010 including Yell.com, Yellow Pages, Google Natural Listings and Google Adwords.
Yellow Pages printed directory has not seen out a full year yet so it’s a touch unfair to comment however we haven’t taken out a large semi display or display advert but a simple bold face entry to ensure that when somebody looks for us in the Yellow Pages that we are easily seen. We don’t anticipate any direct result in terms of new work from this type of entry but regard it as a safety net should an existing client or referral be looking for our number.
Yell.com as mentioned in a previous entry was a disappointment. The advertising spend resulted in a 100% loss but highlighted potential avenues for the future. A local listing covering Romsey and Winchester didn’t produce any enquiries which may suggest that people are more likely to use Google. Although Yell.com receives traffic via Google it would be difficult for a small town local search to produce Yell.com natural listings because of the competition from SEO’d* local more relevant web sites.
Google Natural Listings. We have benefited without question from appearing between position 1 and 3 for a number of local search enquiries. For 2010 the results are without question the best for all mediums when taking into account the time spent on creating the site along with the SEO work put in place for local results. The total return on investment is 1077% not taking into consideration ongoing income, after deducting the investment the return for 2010 is 977%.
Now I am happy to view this as an out of the ordinary return on investment as sometimes the cards fall in your favour, but you have to be at the table in the first place and we were there winning the work. The point we will carry forward into 2011 is the importance of staying at the table, in this case Google’s natural listings, even just in the local area. SEO is an ongoing task but worth the effort and time involved.
(We also place between position 1 and 3 for the same search terms used on Yahoo and Bing but Google is the big one.)
And finally Google Adwords which is directive advertising with a difference. As I’m sure you’re aware you only pay for results with Google Adwords but again this is where measurement is essential. Why? Paying for clicks is all well and good, but those clicks need to convert into sales.
Our results for the campaigns we ran in 2010 were satisfactory in that the total return on investment was 380% after deducting costs just on 280% in the first year. We knew from our testing that the campaigns produced around 1 new client in every 16-20 clicks. At the close it was 1:15. We paid £3.67 per click so the client cost was £55.05, £25 under the £80 we had targeted, you can work the figures out for yourselves I’m sure. Good results, however if we work on our client lifetime value being just 3 years the return on investment is considerably more.
Google Adwords is a fantastic service when you get your ads and landing pages working together to get you showing higher for relevance and for selling your services when clicked. Then when working out your client cost and return on that client cost the rest isn’t rocket science is it? As a great marketing guru of mine puts it, “If a customer costs you £50 from the corner shop and every one you pay for gives you £150, how many times a day would you visit the corner shop?”
On the basis of our results we would have no hesitation in recommending in order of preference trusted local advertising mediums such as the gazettes and Google Adwords campaigns (managed for you initially if you’ve never done one before or if you haven’t the time). This is both stimulative and directive advertising to generate fairly speedy results.
However, one of the most important concerns for all business, regardless of size, is a business website, showing high in Google results for search terms that you can fulfil.
For 2011 our print advertising budget will fall with the local Gazettes. The online budget will be split according to needs, ie. as large contracts come to a close Adwords campaigns will be launched, tested, modified, tested and modified to get them working as well as they can for the necessary duration.
*Stimulative & Directive Advertising
There are 2 types of advertising in general terms, Stimulative, ie Advertising deigned to stimulate you into taking action of one sort or another, TV ads, Magazine Ad’s, Online Banner Ads are good examples. Directive advertising is designed as a service to be turned to when you need to find something ie. You’re already stimulated to take action. The leaders in the field in the UK were Yellow Pages, BT and Thompsons until the internet and in particular Google change the playing field. Google is now probable the most used ‘Directive’ service on the globe.
*SEO
Search Engine Optimisation. The process and practice of optimising a website to appear high on the search results of engines like Google and Bing. For example on 8/2/11 a search on Google for Web Design Romsey returned 76,000 results in quarter of a second. With ten results per page that’s 7600 pages of web site entries! Ape Red Media were in position 1, Giantpea in number 2 , All The top Bananas (recruitment) were in number 3 and Which Web Design Company were in 4th. These sites have been optimised to appear for the phrase web design Romsey and Google has returned them in the results as being the most relevant and useful sites for the phrase web design Romsey.
**Advertising doesn’t work, but ADVERTISING does work
My interpretation of this statement is that a half baked attempt, a poorly created advert, ill thought out tag line and content, lack of or confusing direction and no testing and modification and retesting, regardless of medium will most likely fall flat on it’s face.
However, Clear Direction and understanding of the business objective, Carefully thought out Creative and Textual Content, and Testing, when all working in harmony towards the goal of the advert, does work. I would like to say regardless of medium but that’s not the case. Foot fall, readership, circulation, click rate, creditability, trustworthiness of the medium plays a huge roll and needs consideration.
A full page advert in an irregularly distributed publication that has poor recognition or is miss targeted will like as not on a percentage basis produce poor results when compared with a regularly distributed, commonly accepted publication that is easily identified for what it is and well received by the target group. Case in point the Romsey & Wellow Gazette. 18 years in distribution, it’s 11,500 circulation are more than familiar with it, and trust its content to hold ‘Local’ trades and service advertising.
Not testing and/or not reacting to test results is fools play that we have been guilty of because of time pressure. A small Adwords campaign produced 59 clicks to the landing page which resulted in 4 new clients, great. However the testing showed that the number of times the ad was shown amounted to just short of 13,000!! So just under .5 % We didn’t have the time to modify the advert and/or the landing page as we closed the campaign to devote time to a significant new client who came to us through our natural listing results on Google. But you don’t need to be a Philadelphia Lawyer to figure out the result of running a duplicate ad with slight modifications to see if the .5% can be lifted to .75% or 1% to hit the same landing page which was converting close to 1:15. The result would have been an extra 2 clients at .75% and double the new clients at 1%.
A significant advantage to testing Adwords campaigns and keeping note of the results is that what you learn works online can be transferred to print if you do both. If one set of wording produces a higher response online, isn’t it likely to produce similarly higher results in print?
Advertising doesn’t work, but ADVERTISING DOES WORK!
No comments:
Post a Comment