Newspaper/Magazine Advertising?

Kent Brockman

There is ads everywhere you look~ surely someone is getting business from them? But I have yet to meet a business person who can categorically say "I put an ad here and easily recovered the price of the ad and got a lot more new business in x amount of time" etc.

I have seen the topic discussed quite a bit but rarely if ever see any positive comments. Sometimes you can get an editorial printed if you pay for an ad :rolleyes: and this is certainly better than the ad alone.

I have had some stuff reviewed and recommended in magazines directed at my target market on a few different occasions, but only once did I notice about 10 extra sales of 1 particular item the week following the piece. (IT would not have covered the cost if I had to pay)

I'm sure it is better suited to certain business areas but I just can't seem to justify the costs involved.

Can anyone convince me of the benefits of paying for ads in newspapers & magazines?
Thanks.

Peterdalkey

It is indeed a conundrum with which we all struggle with. The first thing about advertising is that it is multifunctional, it creates product/service, brand and company awareness, in the hope that whena consumer is looking for that particular item, they will come across your offering and recognise your company/brand, people buy from companies that they are familiar with, they somehow feel safer dealing with a name they feel they know. The reality is that since a high in 2007, gross advertising revenues are down by between 37 and 42% , depending on the media involved.

We advertise in industry specific magazines plus use adwords. We used to have an overall budget of 2% of sales, but this is simply not affordable anymore and to be honest is the easiest of all cost cutting measures, a real soft target. We have increased our online spend and reduced both magazine ads and trade show participation budgets because we can be more targeted with our now rather limited promotional budget. At the end of the day, it remains a huge challenge to accurately measure and then justify ad spending, the costs are immediate but the possible returns are spread over a much longer period.

Email marketing is definitely on the wane as both consumers and business are simply over-emailed with promotional messages. We find very specific and targeted Direct Mail much more effective ( and per unit much more expensive) as we can get a product sample into the prospective buyers hands. With advertising you are exposed to a huge number of people who have no interest in your product/service whatsoever. This is especially the case in B2B selling, as we are . With Adwords at least you can focus your campaigns around your industry/product buzz/key words which limits exposure to those who search your general field of activity.

Not sure that this is of much help but it might give you an idea or two.

Half of all advertising
is a waste of money;
we just don‘t know
which half. Henry Ford

Gloomtastic!

Kent Brockman wrote: »

Can anyone convince me of the benefits of paying for ads in newspapers & magazines?

Worked for 20-odd years in B2B publishing where 95% of revenue was advertising. IMHO the only advertising that works ie you can quantify, is recruitment and classified - you are selling a specific item or job. Both of these sectors have moved on-line though. The rest is just fluff, power of association and all that nonsense.

As Peter said above, direct marketing is quantifiable but you may have to spend a lot to get a 1% response or conversion rate.

You can't beat a good salesperson to get results. Finding the right person however is the tricky bit!

The Apprentice

Although i fully agreed with everything you have said peter - i would have 1 particular issue with the conversion rate -

U state 1-2% i would believe this to be a lot higher in relation to actual spend..

My example would be a €10,000 Campaign in various media, we wont specify that has a 100,000 circa advertising ratio - Dublin we shall say..
Nothing major maybe small 1/4 page advert for 1 issue..
You might - a big might get 100,000 eyes with approx 30k actuallly seing and reading your advert and might get possibly 2 sales

The conversion rate may be much much lower down to double digits with the decimal place in the wrong direction
But Depending on what your business whether service or product - 3-5 sales out of this 100k is .00003 - .00005 conversion ratio but one must look at the margins on those 3 sales.

Are you in conveynancy, are you a builder, do you sell 2k Alienware laptops ??

Certainly turnover may well hit over the 10k but the actual margin may be close or even a lot less.
FIguring out a 3-4k profit which is although not profit you will never be up that 10k in this Example but is that or would that not be classed as a 30-40% conversion ratio ?

Direct mail may never be quantifiable, but in the online sector - this kind of marketing spend can be judged down to the cent, which is a step in a positive direction..

Any thoughts on my analysis peter ? Or am i raving mad again ?

Peterdalkey

The Apprentice wrote: »

Although i fully agreed with everything you have said peter - i would have 1 particular issue with the conversion rate -

U state 1-2% i would believe this to be a lot higher in relation to actual spend..

My example would be a €10,000 Campaign in various media, we wont specify that has a 100,000 circa advertising ratio - Dublin we shall say..
Nothing major maybe small 1/4 page advert for 1 issue..
You might - a big might get 100,000 eyes with approx 30k actuallly seing and reading your advert and might get possibly 2 sales

The conversion rate may be much much lower down to double digits with the decimal place in the wrong direction
But Depending on what your business whether service or product - 3-5 sales out of this 100k is .00003 - .00005 conversion ratio but one must look at the margins on those 3 sales.

Are you in conveynancy, are you a builder, do you sell 2k Alienware laptops ??

Certainly turnover may well hit over the 10k but the actual margin may be close or even a lot less.
FIguring out a 3-4k profit which is although not profit you will never be up that 10k in this Example but is that or would that not be classed as a 30-40% conversion ratio ?

Direct mail may never be quantifiable, but in the online sector - this kind of marketing spend can be judged down to the cent, which is a step in a positive direction..

Any thoughts on my analysis peter ? Or am i raving mad again ?

Something very odd going on here my last post just disappeared! I will try to repeat it now.

I have no problem with your analysis except I never mentioned any percentages, it was Gloomtastic! Direct Marketing/Mail is very much a case of sh*te, sh*te out. The better your targeting and list cleanliness, the better the results. The whole Adwords thing works very well if you pick your key words/ phrases well and thus only display to those who search your particular area. I am not a great clicker of Adwords myself, but know from analytics, many do. I much prefer good organic results, which require really decent SEO to achieve consistent results, but is money very well spent.
We get around 5% "buys" from our snail mail postings and around 2% from our email campaigns. Despite the fact that he seems to have a huge problem with me for some unknown reason, at least to me, It is worth reading the posts by Sandin on this topic, he does much better and is clearly right on top of it.

If I were to make only comment, only spend dough on those that you are pretty sure are actually interested in your offering, otherwise it is so easy to set fire to cash. As usual it requires both the hard work and cash to make an impact on sales volumes. No easy way

Cheers


Peter

Gloomtastic!

The Apprentice wrote: »

Although i fully agreed with everything you have said peter - i would have 1 particular issue with the conversion rate -

U state 1-2% i would believe this to be a lot higher in relation to actual spend..

My example would be a €10,000 Campaign in various media, we wont specify that has a 100,000 circa advertising ratio - Dublin we shall say..
Nothing major maybe small 1/4 page advert for 1 issue..
You might - a big might get 100,000 eyes with approx 30k actuallly seing and reading your advert and might get possibly 2 sales

The conversion rate may be much much lower down to double digits with the decimal place in the wrong direction
But Depending on what your business whether service or product - 3-5 sales out of this 100k is .00003 - .00005 conversion ratio but one must look at the margins on those 3 sales.

Are you in conveynancy, are you a builder, do you sell 2k Alienware laptops ??

Certainly turnover may well hit over the 10k but the actual margin may be close or even a lot less.
FIguring out a 3-4k profit which is although not profit you will never be up that 10k in this Example but is that or would that not be classed as a 30-40% conversion ratio ?

Direct mail may never be quantifiable, but in the online sector - this kind of marketing spend can be judged down to the cent, which is a step in a positive direction..

Any thoughts on my analysis peter ? Or am i raving mad again ?

I mentioned 1% for direct mail. That's not advertising space in magazines per se but inserts In magazines, mailing directly to your target market or door to door leaflet drops.

I used to run a trade exhibition. To get 5000 people to visit the show you would have to send out 500,000 tickets/promotional letters to our target market. So you would spend upwards of £100,000 on 5,000 visitors or £20 per visitor. However, with those 5000 visitors you could attract £1million in exhibition space.

Display advertising space eg 1/4 pages in the editorial pages, can produce nothing in terms of response. It's really impossible to quantify in terms of spend/revenue received. You would be quite mad to even try and work it out!

highlandseoghan

I never found newspaper advertising any good. I have done a few different campaigns in different campaigns and never got a great response. Newspaper advertising is good for building brand awareness.

I have hired advertising trailers and have found them very good but it depends on your product / service and targeted market.

sandin

It all depends on your market and frequency of advertising.

I believe in targeting a sector and hitting it with constant advertising. In different araes the we trade, its different media.

Local paid newspapers have been in downtrend for a while. Primary readers are the older commumity minded. If I was selling to a 55+ audience, I'd look into it.

Freesheets - depending on the quality of news and depending whether its pick up or delivered. Primarily targets the housewife who will flick through in. Many times people use it for local services such as looking for a plumber or seeing what sales are on. If its a good one such as Southside in Dublin or Cark News in Cork, response from female audiene can be good.

Magazines - I think these are more suitable for brand building and best left for the majors. Unless it is very specific such as a wedding magazine and you are advertising photography.

Radio is another medium I use quite a lot. However in Dublin it is very fragmented with 14 stations available whereas in Cork, 96fm are dominant but rate are prohibitive.


One business I have will commence main season advertising soon - it will be freesheet based and will be 31cm x 3col / 4 col. It will run every week with similar style but with different messages from mid september to mid December. Every advert will be on the right hand page and in forst half og the paper.
By booking 12 insertions with same paper I get very good rate (they all quoted circa €500 / adverts against rate cards of up to €1300), by week 4 I expect to see a good response and in December I expect to reap the rewards of the combination of all the advertising.

Similarly if I was on radio, it would be a 10 week - 12 week campaign with good response not coming until week 3 or 4.

The biggest waste of advertising is a single one off advert unless it is a brilliant and unbeatable one time offer you have.

IRE60

Interesting to see the different rates here for the different media, and some very valid points: sh*t, in shi*t out - its applicable to all advertising and the fragmentation of Dublin radio is also noteworthy.

Advertising has always been the soft target in budget cut-backs, but time and time again the research concludes that those that either maintained or increased advertising in a rescission did a whole lot better when the recession was tailing off/over.

All very laudable until you have to make a cash flow decision - pay the staff or take a full page in the Indo, then that research is out the window!

Gloomtastic!

IRE60 wrote: »

Interesting to see the different rates here for the different media, and some very valid points: sh*t, in shi*t out - its applicable to all advertising and the fragmentation of Dublin radio is also noteworthy.

Advertising has always been the soft target in budget cut-backs, but time and time again the research concludes that those that either maintained or increased advertising in a rescission did a whole lot better when the recession was tailing off/over.

All very laudable until you have to make a cash flow decision - pay the staff or take a full page in the Indo, then that research is out the window!

Every TV commercial break seems to be stuffed with Unilever products. I know they've always held the same idea as you.

On a slightly separate note, I see Investment Meister Warren Buffet has increased his share holdings in several newspaper publishers. Maybe we're missing something.....

http://m.rte.ie/news/2012/0815/buffetts-firm-drops-intel-buys-oil-stocks-business.html

Formation

The cost of advertising in the national newspapers is crazy.

The only effective ads I have ever seen in the newspaper is where the bookies offer a free fiver on something like the grand national if you bet a fiver and bring in the newspaper voucher.

everything else is generally skimmed over without the reader registering most of the information in the ad.

on the radio the only ad that got my attention was for a dublin taxi company.

Trade magazines or targeted online advertising (facebook apps/adwords) seem to work best.

A billboard along a stretch of road that has the evening traffic jams would be good but then again hugely expensive.

Give the customer a reason to recommend your product is the best way (again facebook apps) or if 2 people purchase your product both get a 10% discount.

Have something printed on the back of a business card that would encourage the person to keep the card in their wallet, it used to be a calendar but these days it could be something like the 6 nations schedule.

door to door leaflets would be good but seem to be on the wane.

another thing i like is on the back of a receipt from one business is a discount voucher for a different business, eg sister restaurants.

something like we will have a car in a certain area on monday with a code on the bonnet, come in to our store with the code and get 10% discount, people tell others to be on the lookout... Word of mouth.

the old scratchcard thing where you had to spell a word using 1 letter from each receipt to get a discount and each receipt you get in the meantime has a random letter.

IRE60

He's (Buffett) buying them at a bargain rate (likewise, look at what Celtic Media paid here). Saying that, he believes in the printed model - for the time being. I'd suggest he buying the brand and all that it entails - plus the local dimension of knowledge and trust.

Kent Brockman

Had an interesting chat with a magazine editor who gave me a different viewpoint.

E.g. Someone buys my product, they love it and tell their friend who also loves it and wants one.
The friend forgets about it, but some time later sees an ad in a magazine for my products.
They then order from me and when I ask where they heard about it they say that their friend has one and told them about it. This is true but it was the ad that reminded them and because they don't mention that part I don't realise that the ad has been worthwhile.

Interesting.....

Peterdalkey

Somebody in the magazine business would say that, wouldn't they! It requires a pretty tenuous coincidence for the person who liked the product to actually come across that particular advert in that particular magazine. It might happen once, even twice but you could never recover the cost of a maximum 2 sales!
The only hope might be if it is aimed at a very specific interest group and that market has a decent circulation magazine targeted at specifically at it.