How To Find Advertising That Works for YOU

One of the most important skills for a young computer business to master is advertising. I see it time and time again where technicians will ask “what form of advertising worked best for you?” only for the responses to be fairly mixed. One will say that their Yellow Pages ad brings in 90% of their clients while another business will say that he only gets 1 call a month from it.

I wish that I could give Technibble readers a silver bullet for advertising, but what worked well for me wont necessarily work well for you. What I can do however, is tell you the factors you need to take into consideration to eventually find what works great for you.

Average Income Level

In the first couple of years of starting my own business, I put some small ads in the local weekly newspaper which worked pretty well for me. The great part about the local papers is that I could specify which group of suburbs I would like my ad to appear in. In the first year or so, I made it so the ads appeared in all the suburbs, in all directions, within a 30 minute drive from me. It was great to get the work but after doing a few hundred jobs I started to notice a trend, the people in the wealthy beachside suburbs closer to the city brought in much more money for me than the poorer, inland suburbs further away from the city.

Now, I charged the same for both suburbs so how did one create more than the other? In most cases, the people in the wealthy suburbs were business owners and they would either get me to do more work requiring more hours or buy more stuff. They also didn’t care as much about the price since they can write much of it off on tax.

Another thing that happened is after these clients were happy with my work at their home, they would often get me to look at their businesses computers as well. Also, business owners usually have friends that also own their own business and thus more likely to recommend you to them.

On the other hand, when I was doing work in the poorer suburbs the jobs were often harder and didn’t pay as well since they wont spend a cent on the computer until it had completely failed. Chances are they bought a cheaper computer to begin with.

Type of People In the Area

The type of people that reside in area of town you are advertising in is another important factor to consider. Are they young and funky? families? go getting professionals? or the elderly?

I found the young and funky are usually Mac users and are either poor (university students) or have access to someone else who can fix their computers. Families can bring in a decent amount of income, especially around the beginning or end of the school holidays. I found the professionals to be good clients because they understand they need to spend money to make money. The elderly also make good clients because once they find someone who is patient with them and they can trust, they tend to keep calling you back.

However, this not to say that you should try and target one type of client over the other, you may not have much of a choice. If the majority of your town are elderly, there’s not much point targeting the few professionals that are around. To target the elderly, you will need ad copy that will appeal to them like “Inexpensive, Friendly and Patient computer education. Learn how to email, surf the web, use your digital camera etc..”

Ad Size

A bigger ad is better if you can afford it, right? Well, not always, it depends on your market. The wealthy professionals may be attracted to it, but the impoverished young and funky university students, the families and the elderly may be completely turned off. Why? Because a lot of people believe that if you have a big ad, your services are going to be expensive. I have personally encountered this where I made an ad smaller and it surprisingly did better. If you are targeting businesses, then a larger ad may be better.

Ad Frequency

As I mentioned earlier, I used to place ads in the local weekly paper. One time I tried the big, state wide daily paper which was considerably more expensive because I had an ad in 7 issues to last throughout the week. I expected it to work great but it turns out I didn’t get a single call. The reason why the local weekly free paper worked so much better because:
1. It was free so everyone had it
2. What do you do with yesterdays daily paper once you have today’s? Throw it out. What do you do with the weekly paper? Keep it around the house all week (with my ad in it) until the next issue comes in.

Tracking Your Ads

The most important thing with any advertising is to track your results. If you don’t track your results, how are you supposed to know whats working and what isn’t? In most cases its as easy as simply asking them where they heard about you and writing it down.

However, if you are testing various ad sizes/text/location in a single publication you may want to offer a discount voucher or something with a special code each time you change it so you know which one worked. I have personally had people who cut my ad out of the paper, put it on the fridge and called me a year later. If I didn’t put a discount voucher with a tracking code in it I wouldn’t have known that ad was from a year ago.

As I mentioned at the start, there is no silver bullet answer I can give you about your advertising. You need to keep testing various publications using various text and sizes and to track it. Keep advertising in the ones that work, stop the ones that don’t and put that money into testing out another ad elsewhere. Eventually you will find out what works for you and you’ll have highly effective ads for your money.