Stop me if this sounds familiar to you, but I feel it bears repeating at least a few more times. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Ring any bells to you? It is a quote attributed to famed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. While he may not have specifically been talking about advertising, the idea still holds true and bears consideration.
As consumer culture becomes increasingly fickle, it has become clear that companies can no longer rely on customer loyalty and simple word of mouth to drive business growth. If you don’t have effective advertising, you are effectively limiting your profit potential. Not all advertising is the same, though, and you need to constantly evaluate your results.
Its all to easy to fall into a rut with your advertising and commercial printing. Maybe you’ve been running the same ads for years and, while they worked early on, maybe they’ve become stale and are no longer drawing in new customers to your business. Perhaps you just started on a new ad campaign and are wondering when you’ll start seeing the increased revenues for your investment. Either way, it is vitally important to gather quantifiable measurements of the results and effectiveness of your current advertising investment.
This can be as simple as asking new faces that arrive to your doorstep how they heard about you or it can be as complex as surveying and compiling data to cover month to month and year to year changes in customer demographics. Whatever quantitative measurement tools you choose to use, you need to verify that you are not only seeing results from your ads, but also seeing great enough increases in business to exceed the costs of the ads. This should be simple and it likely sounds like common sense, but I’ve always been a proponent that common sense is anything but common.
No matter how badly you want to support the local community newspaper you run your ads in or how much you just loved that one brochure you came up with in the early 1980’s, if it no longer works for your business, you have to ask yourself where your priorities lie. Take an honest look at the results of your advertising dollars and, if your investment is no longer working for you, then stop the insanity and try something new. When your advertising campaign is back on track and pulling in new customers you can feel free to thank me or good old uncle Einstein.
