What’s the point of an ad?

Every marketing company does the same thing. It’s called direct response marketing.

If you hear someone who wants to convince you that they know something better than direct marketing, it’s usually a great sign to turn away.

They may say that brand awareness is important and it’s actually beneficial. Well, in my humble opinion it’s total garbage. Unless you have $500M in the bank. In that case maybe there’s a little chance that it works.

Let me tell you why.

If you put up an ad, how do you know whether it’s successful or not?

You see that you’ve spent X amount and it brought you back Y amount. If Y > X you’d made a great deal. You throw money into a machine and it spits out more money, it’s FREE MONEY.

But how do you know if you made more than you’ve spent?

You measure.

Let’s say I know that I’ve spent $1000 and 100 people called me. So 100 people have clicked the call button on my ad (every advertising platform lets you measure that).

And your sales team told you out of that 100 people they closed 60.

If that 60 purchase brings you more profit than your initial $1000 then you know it was worth it.

With brand awareness, you can’t measure. There is no call to action button on your ad. You know nothing about your ads performance.

And you may say that the point of your ad was to make people more aware of you and I totally get this.

But people will recognise your store if you did direct response marketing as well. That’s the beauty of it. You get more customers, you can measure if you did well AND as a side effect you will get brand awareness as well.

So with brand awareness you just miss out on the whole point of an ad. To get what you actually want. More customers, sales or whatever.

Only big companies do brand awareness because they have the budget to target you 8x a day for months. That way you MAY build familiarity (or may not) and buy a product or two from them.

But you, you don’t have the budget for this. Neither do I. And even if I had, I wouldn’t do brand awareness.

Now I hope you’ll never fall into this trap.

If you want to make sure that you don’t fall into most of the common traps while advertising a local business, check out my free guide.