A question I’m often asked by small business owners is whether they should advertise their products and services. My standard answer to this question is usually no and there are several reasons why. But there are some exceptions to this rule and during this article I want to go through both why I don’t think you should advertise and the exceptions in which you should.

There are three main reasons why you shouldn’t advertise your products or services, which are:

1. Advertising is better for awareness than getting customers Have a think about some of the adverts you know – ones you like the jingles too or ones you hate. Which ones spring to mind? Now ask yourself the question of have you ever bought the product or service directly from the advert? For a very small number of you – about 1-2%, the answer will be yes. But for the vast majority of us, the answer will be no.

And even if you think you have bought something directly from the advert, think again. Was it from the advert or did you also see it in another place (like at your friend’s house etc) which reminded you to buy it?

You see, adverts are great for making people aware of your products or services – people like or hate the advert, but advertising is not so great for getting customers. I would imagine that there are adverts that you like or hate, but don’t even know what the product or service is.

But, there are much better and free ways of getting awareness of your product or service rather than using an advert which of course you have to pay for.

2. You don’t know whose seen your advert If you advertise, you will have absolutely no idea who has seen your advert unless they contact you. There may very well have been some people who saw your advert and meant to contact you, but never actually got around to it.

If you don’t know who has seen your advert, you cannot stay in touch with that person and build your relationship until they are ready to buy. The only way you can try and build a relationship is by repeating the advert again in the hope that if they see it a second, a third or even a fourth time, they may actually get in touch with you.

And that’s going to prove quite expensive…

3. Advertising costs money Advertising can be extremely expensive. For a newspaper advert, you can be talking anywhere from £150 to £3000 and that’s just for your local paper. Radio advertising, if you want it during the time people are going or coming back from work can be in the region of £10,000 and TV, well that’s anyone’s guess. If you’re going to need to repeat your advert continuously to get attention and it’s better ultimately for getting awareness than for getting customers, surely there must be another way?

The good news is that there are lots of ways to get awareness of your business for free – I don’t have space in this article to go into all of these now, but if you email me on Helen.dowling@exceptionalthinking.co.uk I’ll happily send over 50 ideas to help you market and promote your business for free.

But, if you must advertise, you can break the rules and get around the problems I’ve mentioned above. The way to do that is to give away something for free. This could be a sample, free report, top 10 tips on how to solve a problem, or get people to enter a competition. If someone contacts you as a result of your advert asking for the free item or entering your competition, you know that the person is interested in what you do. You can then build a relationship with that person until they’re ready to buy.