Why One Big Ad is a Waste of Money

Continuing my focus on the Formula for Advertising Success...

Click here to read the Formula.

Click here to read the first part (Reach).

Now that you're caught up, let's talk about Frequency.

I sometimes get the question, "how much does it cost to advertise?" and I usually answer that question with a question, "What are you trying to accomplish with your advertising?"

I'm not in business to try and get the most money out of someone, I'm in the business to help them develop a plan that works.

By that I mean, reach the goals they have both long range and short term.

Rarely have I ever had someone do too much advertising, yet I've seen a lot of money wasted becasue it wasn't allocated properly.

Last week, I talked about Reach, the number of people that will potentially see or hear your ad.

Frequency is just as important, if not more important than Reach.

Frequency is how many times a person is going to hear or see your message. And to illustrate this principle, let's talk about dating.

I met my wife of nearly ten years about a year before we wed. We dated for 6 months before getting engaged.

What do you suppose would have happened if I asked her to marry me the first time we met and if she said no, then I didn't have any contact with her.

Yep, I'd still be single.

It takes more than one advertisement to bring in loyal customers, no matter how much money you spend on that one ad.

It may take 3 to 4 times (or more) for the target customer to even become aware of your ad, another 3 or 4 times for them to understand who or what the ad is for, and unless they are in the market for what you are advertising, it will take consistent exposure over time (like dating) for that particular person to buy from you.

Here's a simple math question:

You have $12,000 you can spend for advertising. You can get one full size color ad in the Sunday newspaper which reaches 100,000 people with the frequency of 1.

Or you can budget that $12,000 on a radio campaign to last you 12 full months. With one of my radio stations, I can craft a steady advertising plan that reaches 41,000 people over 80 times over the year. That's a frequency of 80.

One last question to drive home the point of Frequency.

The following bought one $3,000,000 (or more) ad in the 2010 Superbowl.

Do you remember them:

Dockers
HomeAway
kgb
U.S. Census Bureau