Wasted Marketing & Advertising Dollars

Man I hate me some wasted advertising dollars. Like last night for example. My wife and I were discussing how disappointed we are with our cable television service and how we want to switch. I swear to you not ten minutes later we received a call with “good news” that some company is “installing satellite dishes in [my] area”.

So even though I was spending my once per weekday, very limited time with my kids before they went to bed, I decided to hold on the line for a sales rep. By the way, as much as everyone hates cold call telemarketing, this is the exact reason it’s still done – because it works.

I hang on the line for about a half minute and then hung up. The reps deal with people yelling at them all day/night long and the predictive dialer finally gets an interested party (me) on the line that’s late in the buying cycle and they can’t get anyone on the line to speak with me. Worse, I didn’t even get a call back a couple minutes later from a system that should have known it lost someone who wanted to hear more.

Unfortunately, wasting money on advertising is all too common. A lot of times it occurs because the business owner or marketing manager is swamped and doesn’t have the tools in front of him or her to know what’s working or not working. I meet with a lot of decision makers that can’t tell me whether various aspects of their advertising are breaking even with them.

For example, a lot of business owners will point to online usage statistics like visits and visitors – that they may or may not understand – as a way to measure how effectively their online presence is performing for them.

While those metrics are useful, it’s even better to look at what efforts are having a direct, measurable effect on your sales and lead flows. Many businesses, even ones that take traditional branding approaches, can utilize direct marketing techniques to look at just a few simple numbers (cost, leads from source, new sales from source, total sales from source, net profit from source) and know what’s working for them.

ROI, or Return on Investment, should be easy for decision makers to point to. If you don’t know exactly how effective your marketing efforts are and whether you’re actually making any money from using them, you need to do some research. Then give us a call at 1-800-979-3177 or request a free online marketing consultation to learn if and how we can make money for you.

End Note: If you read the description on
If I had more room,
“except for when they beat Tennessee”, which they did last

UT is on a losing streak to Vanderbilt in football and even if by
Now we just have to get McFadden in a Dores uniform.