Do Business Well

I’ve made several mentions of AC International’s recent entry into the water bottle business. A large portion of our sales is made to companies who want either to sell or give away bottles with their name, logo, and/or message on the side. For less than two dollar apiece, a dealer can give customers who’ve purchased a bike a bottle that has the dealer’s store name and phone number emblazoned on the side.

With this range of possible advertising venues in mind, you’ll now want to begin to decide what approach to take to get your message out. Part of that process will include whether or not to use an advertising agency.

Unless you’ve had substantial advertising experience, have access to someone who does, or like to burn up your money with no idea of whether or not it will bring results, you’ll need the help of a professional advertising agency. Even in the best of situations advertising is not an exact science. You can hire the best, follow their directions exactly, and still not get the results you hoped for. However, well-planned and -executed advertising can produce remarkable results.

When you’re starting out and don’t have much money for advertising, it’s difficult to attract a large, well-established agency. Using the recommendations of others, the Yellow Pages, your bank, or chamber of commerce, you’ll want to look at the qualifications and portfolios of several agencies before making your selection. If nothing else, these interviews will teach you a great deal about how advertising works.

There are two kinds of agencies. Most of the larger ones are full-service, meaning that they can handle every aspect of the campaign from concept to paste-up and placement. Smaller agencies, by contrast, specialize in one or another portion of the business. In the early stages of your development you’ll want an agency that is versatile enough to make an intelligent suggestion as to the best media for you to use. Once you’ve decided how much money to allocate to each category, you should ask the agency’s account executive some serious questions about the agency’s ability to develop the actual ad.

For instance, a good agency will tell you if you need to spend 25 percent of your budget on outdoor advertising, even if it hasn’t had experience in this area. Then it will help you find someone who does.

With respect to advertising, you should set specific goals that you want to achieve. Maybe—over the course of a six-week campaign—you want to increase the number of people walking through your door by 35 percent. Possibly you want 30 percent of the people in your market to be able to identify you and your product within one year. Fifty new clients with opening orders of five hundred dollars or more within six months might make you happy.

Tell the advertising agency what your goal is. They should honestly tell you whether they believe advertising can achieve that goal. If you fall substantially short of your plan, and assuming you have not interfered with the agency’s suggested approach, it is very likely the fault of the agency. Consider a new one.

At this point in your business plan you’ll want to describe the advertising plan that you have for your opening. Possibly you’ll want to include some rough sketches of the concept. Indicate the budget, the media, the frequency, and, above all, the goal.

Next, include a statement of the method you’ll use to appropriate advertising money for future budgets. Possible approaches might include: a percentage of last year’s sales; a percentage of projected sales; a dollar amount that seems affordable.

It’s important to remember one major limitation of advertising. The best campaign in the world will only get the customer to try your product, service, or store once. Ultimately, what keeps the customer coming back is quality and service.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
I Made My Own Advertising Work part 3

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• Expenditure on Advertising: Would I have made more Profit if I had Spent less on Advertising? (1-9)
• I Made My Own Advertising Work part 1
• How Will You Promote Your Product or Service?
• It takes time so have faith: Six simple steps ( 3&4)
• Advertising Ideas
• Does Advertising have a Future?
• Advertising Loves to Entertain; Its Real Objective Should Be to Generate Excitement
• Buying Growth
• What Evidence Do You Have of Success?

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