What is your most effective advertising?

[tragu]

Hello,

I think it would be useful for all business owners to know the most effective advertising tool of each other.

So far, Google Adwords (www.adwords.google.com) has been the most effective advertising tool for me. I use Adwords to drive traffic to my website. What I like about Adwords is that you can laser-target your prospects. Furthermore, you can track so many things, which I won't go into details here.

However, there is a steep learning curve in using Adwords. If you plan to use it, read all the information available on the web before spending significant money on it.

I'm looking forward to know your most effective advertising tool/medium.

Best regards,
Thuva

[babysham]

Word of mouth.

[intrepidia]

for one of my businesses, I used Wilds (or street posters. 11 * 17 full colour posters and had a high school student put them up.... Worked great for local market.... (I was in the prepaid home telephone game)

Cheers
Intrepidia

[shellysoda]

Mine has been word of mouth as well. We've also been in a few magazines (in feature articles) and that has brought in quite a few new customers as well. I've heard both good and bad things about adwords but if it works for you that's fantastic! Marketing is tricky stuff, lol

[ranny3]

Flyers in the mail, old school but actually works. We had a client starting out a Tax/Business Consulting service. She ended up sending out 50 000 flyers in mailboxes around the city around tax time (Feb/March) - very effective in getting new customers especially since many ppl have taxes in their minds around that time.

She was able to pay the guys that send out 'publi-sac' and have them put in peoples mailboxes.

[GroceryBagHead]

I put mine is forum signatures and hope for the best
Actually I don't have any experience with it, so I'm going to follow this thread for while.

[1234PENS]

I would say Promotional Products!

Give away a pen or a keychain with your company name & logo on it. People love free stuff.

www.masalpromo.com / www.1234PENS.com

[Derek]

Word of mouth for sure would be the most effective for us probably followed by PR which is also another form of word of mouth.

[meatpie77]

Word of mouth works best for me, but it can take some time to get going.

I recently tried a very small run of 200 flyers just in my neighborhood. I got 3 calls: 1 new customer, 1 pyramid scheme recruiter, and 1 super weird creepy guy who had a business proposition for me that he couldn't talk about over the phone... which didn't sound like it was completely illegal until I thought about it for about one second.

I think I'll stick with word of mouth.

[angiek]

I work for a small business and I have found that word of mouth is the best.
Second best is if you can get an article about your business in your local community newspaper. Something about grand opening or new line in store.
It is pretty effective if your clientelle are living where your business is.
We had a jewerlley store open up here and somehow about every three months there was an article about his store in the community paper, he got so many new customers out of that. Unfortunately he was scamming them and many people lost their rings and stuff. But because he was in the newspaper people trusted him right away. It was free advertising for him because it was community events, he did not have to pay anything for this.
Promotional products are a hit and miss. It is good to give it to your clients but for new clients it doesn't always work unless it is a new type of gimmick product that people have a use for like a small camera memory card or a USB attache, but that is getting very expensive and you need alot of them.
As for pens, we are so used to having something written on a pen that no one really reads it anymore. Again good to remind your clients about you but for new clients hit and miss.
Giving a discount is another good one especially if the customer is caught off guard and didn't expect one. Nothing travells faster than a discount you did not have to scam or fight for.

These are basically only good if your clients are living where your business is.

[Canucklehead]

Wife is a lawyer - and 100% of her business is due to word of mouth. She has never advertised (8 years now) but seems to be busy. Not as busy as I'D like her to be hehehe.....

Pretty simple philosophy: treat customers/clients like you would like to be treated.

[sharkyJay]

I've been studying, researching, and doing a lot of marketing in the last couple of years. Once you really understand advertising most concepts are very simple. But there are so many areas to think about that it may seem complicated.

Too keep it short I'll give my perspective on some of the ideas talked about so far.

Word of mouth.

Everyone knows this is very important. Almost all businesses I talked to say this is the most effective. Bad word of mouth can do major damages to your business too. It's like Karma, treat your customers good and it'll come bad to you. This is so successful because of the 'medium is the message' concept (more on this below).

for one of my businesses, I used Wilds (or street posters

In this case posters worked great because the customer is exposed to the message several times. One poster at each corner or poll closed to each other. As the times they see your message increases the chances of them remembering you and considering your service increases exponentially. This concept also explains:

I recently tried a very small run of 200 flyers just in my neighborhood. I got 3 calls...

The customer is only exposed to your message once. If you did the flyers to the exact 200 places over and over again, you will see exponential results each time. But depending on your business I would probably say 200 is most likely not enough.

From experience I find that most flyers done by a business (even ones that have it 'professionally' done) is not effective. Professional Copywriting (persuasive style of writing for advertising) was not use.

We had a jewerlley store open up here and somehow about every three months there was an article about his store in the community paper, he got so many new customers out of that.

Once last thing. As Angiek's showed, medium is the message. Even advertising in the newspaper next to the editorial is more trusted than most other advertising. This is why yellow flyers on car windshields don't work. One is that it is not viewed a trustworthy source (newspaper = trustworthy) and two people subconsciously associate it with the negativity of parking tickets.

I hope this helps other businesses do better advertising/marketing.

[BobW]

Word of mouth is everything. Yellow pages work well for me as well, although they are quite expensive and keep jacking their rates

Signage on my vehicle generates lots of calls as well.

I did a newspaper ad once... all it gets is tirekickers; basically people too lazy to grab a phonebook. Wouldn't do that again.

Tried the signs in boulevards once as well. No response at all on them.

[sharkyJay]

Which method works also depends on your business. No one method will be as effective for all.

So tell us the type of business you have.

[meatpie77]

The customer is only exposed to your message once. If you did the flyers to the exact 200 places over and over again, you will see exponential results each time. But depending on your business I would probably say 200 is most likely not enough.

You're right, of course -- however, I was trying to emphasize the point that if you do any kind of mass-marketing, on any scale, you will probably get a few strange calls from con artists, opportunists, and just plain wacko's. The person that attempted to recruit me into a Pyramid Scheme wasn't successful, obviously, but it made me nervous about answering my phone for the rest of the day, and it raised my "Personal Homeland Security" meter up to Condition Red for a week or so.

This was just a scenario I didn't expect to encounter, and from my experience I think I'll just stick with word-of-mouth marketing in the future.

PS - the one customer I did get out of it, tho, has called me to work for her 3 times in the past month, and will most likely tell all her friends and colleagues about me. I'm pretty happy about that.