Do you know where most of your work is coming from? Which form of advertising, marketing or PR is creating the most sales for you? Most people don't and that means you can save some serious money and make even more.
You see, if you know that your yellow pages advert is not getting many (or any) calls, but the advert in your local newspaper is generating 40 a week then you need to stop advertising in your yellow pages. In my opinion, for 99% of businesses the Yellow Pages and all paper directories are DEAD - and they know it.
It is important to know where your leads are coming from, to know how people hear about you and end up making contact, if you do this then you can increase how economical you are with your marketing. Lets go back tot he yellow pages example above, if its generating no leads for you then there is no point in spending the £1000 or so on it each year, you'd be better to use that money else-where.
Now comes the testing, say you dump your Yellow Pages because you realise it sucks - and you know your advert in the local paper is generating a lot of business - do you therefor use the money you saved on Yellow Pages to have a bigger, better advert in the paper? You might think that to start its a great idea, and I'd say it's definitely worth trying out. However having more adverts, more frequently in the paper may actually be a waste of time and additional expense.
WHY? Let's say you are selling hearing aids. If you run an advert about hearing aids which generates 80 enquiries that is great. However, running another advert in the same paper, or making that same advert colour, or larger may result in the SAME number of leads generated because you might have already attracted everyone who is interested in that product. So with adverts it is always interesting to see what you can cut out (size, colour, positioning) to save money without loosing the results. This is all achieved by testing and keeping records.
In my experience I'd say you'd have to run an advert for 3 consecutive months to get a true reading of its effectiveness.
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