Filtering Posts by Topic: Media Buying

The Biggest Barrier To Growing Your Company Might Be Tied To The Way You Think About Your Easiest Home Improvement Leads.

Written by Rich Harshaw.

Let’s start with a question: As a contractor, how much should you spend on marketing, as a percentage of sales?

Ten years ago, the most common answer I’d hear from remodelers was 10%. So in other words, if a company was selling $100,000 a month, they’d shoot for a $10,000 monthly marketing budget. A $4 million dollar company would budget $400,000 for marketing and advertising.

More recently that percentage, on average, has gone up even higher. 12% to 15% is pretty common… and many spend even more than that—up to 20%. Home improvement lead generation has definitely gotten more expensive, and since leads are the lifeblood of a business… well… you gotta do what you gotta do.

But whenever this question of budget as a percentage of sales comes up, there are always a handful of companies that shudder at the notion of 10%; for this select group, even 5% seems like way too much for a contractor’s marketing budget. They give me answers like 2% or 3%… and seem outraged at the thought of spending a penny more.
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This Is A Follow-Up To The Last Article About Testing…
Solid Advice For How To Actually DO IT.

Written by Rich Harshaw.

Want a recipe for advertising disaster? Here’s a script I’ve seen run a thousand times:

The Great Western Closet Company designs and installs custom closet organizers in upscale homes in a medium-sized city in the west. In consulting with the owner, Mike, I was convinced that direct mail could be a profitable advertising medium. Mike, however, was opposed. “We mailed over 30,000 pieces last spring, but only got six jobs from it. I lost almost $1,500 on the deal. Home improvement shows are the only reliable source of leads for this kind of company.”

Their first problem was that they didn’t send out their own mailer. Their ad was a four-color, 8½ x 11 sheet printed on the back of a boot store’s ad. The ad was sent out with several others in a ValPak-type mailer. Mike wasn’t sure which geographic areas had actually received his advertisement, and he couldn’t verify that 30,000 pieces had gone out. As for the ad itself, it contained no headline, made no compelling case for their product, and made no specific offer. There was nothing telling why their product was great, what advantages it held over the competition and the alternatives, or what benefits would come from using the product—it just said “Here it is, buy it from us for no justifiable, rational reason.”

Really, it just doesn’t work in your industry? Naturally some types of media are more suited for some industries than others. But more often than not, when I look at the AD that was actually ran in the so-called crummy media, it’s a large, steaming pile of dung—meaning of course, that it stinks.
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Take The Time To Scientifically Test Your Advertising
In Small Doses Before Launching A Full-Scale Blitz.

Written by Rich Harshaw.

In his classic book Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill says that one of the major causes of failure is that people “prefer to act on opinions created by guesswork or snap-judgments rather than facts.” Advertising decisions based on what you think will work rather than what the marketplace wants is the main reason advertisements don’t work—and that marketing plans fail. Your livelihood depends on your ability to determine which messages will effectively attract new customers and entice your current customers to come back for more.

You can make these determinations by putting every important marketing and advertising question to a vote by the only people whose ballots count: customers and prospects. This “voting” takes place in the form of small, inexpensive tests. An advertising test is different than a questionnaire, a survey, or a focus group. Those things don’t necessarily reflect your prospects’ willingness to put their money where their mouths are—and the results are usually skewed toward what the participants think you want to hear. Or what they think they might do. Testing, on the other hand, allows you to find out definitively which headlines, offers, prices, etc. the market will respond to—and cause them to buy—before you spend a fortune on advertising.
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How Many Licks Does It Take To Get To The Center Of A Tootsie Pop?
How Long Should You Run Your Commercials Before Mixing Them Up?

Written by Rich Harshaw.

The year I was born—1969—Coca Cola had already been in business for 83 years, and they were on their 27th advertising slogan, “The Real Thing.” The campaign ran in various forms for 6 years, until 1975, when they introduced a bicentennial theme, “Look Up America.”

Here’s a reminder of “The Real Thing,” and it’s more famous sister, “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke.”
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