How Much Is Your Advertising??

chuck_g

Hey All

Not sure if this is in the right place. Im doing some research for a new Business ive started and im just curious to what people are paying out there for a years advertising. Ie Golden Pages, Papers, Billboards, Bus Stops and general Media Space.

Any help Appreciated

Cheers

Charlie

dudara

Moved to Entrepreneurial & Business Management

dudara

chuck_g

dudara wrote: »

Moved to Entrepreneurial & Business Management

dudara

Cheers Fella.......

Anybody???

aidan.connolly

Hi,

Don't do as I did... !
When we launched our business, a newspaper who were bringing out a supplement contacted us, with " a baragin rate" for a half page add in a supplement 1.5K Euro. We jumped at the offer ( more fool us) .
We got very little from the add in business.

When he called the next time offering the add for 1750.00 , we had decided that we were not willing to pay the price. He came back 30 minutes later with a price of 500.00 for the same add, same size etc. I was sickened and learn't a very valuable lesson.

A couple of weeks ago we were contacted by another news paper who told us they were running a supplement relating to our industry. The price of the add was 1100.00 "discounted from 1700.00 ", which based on previous experience we told him no. He came back two day later with a price of 500.00. We however learn't our second lesson. When the supplement cam out in last Sunday's paper it turned out to be nothing but a commercial project, nothing but adds and no editorial.

The next time we will ask. I hope my story helps.

good luck with your new business.

regards

Aidan

Mr Clonfadda

Hi OP

It really depends on what you do and what size you business is

Take advice from Aidan don't just say yes to the first price.

We advertise in Golden Pages spend about 1200 doesn't provide a good return but i believe my business needs to be there. Golden pages online about the same but much better return.

have done a bit of Radio sponsorship on local radio but its very expensive for the return but I'm selling to business not the public.

You need to try and measure the return from all forms of media.

Hope that helps a little

Good luck with the business

Pixelcraft

Nigel, how much more of a return are you getting online compared to the printed copy? surprised to hear that.

chuck_g

Cheers Lads they are very very helpful answers....keep them coming

Charlie

shoutman

I did some soul destroying work two summers ago for a business magazine in ireland, I was selling ads for a "commericial editorial" basically the company buys advertising space in an article on the industry and in turn the company is quoted in the article etc.

I could sell ads at 40% of the rate card price and any lower would have to be cleared by a superior.

So my rule of thumb would be to start negotiations below 40%....

Mr Clonfadda

I'm in the IT Sector and all my customers and potential customers use computers, most of them will find us via internet.

We have just cancelled our phonebook advertising as a result of this.

Dabko

Selling to general public in a couple of specilist markets. Biggest waste of money over last 4-5years in business was large advertising in newspapers. Not enough return to cover the cost.
We now only have small 'services section' adverts in newspapers, for consistency, coming in at between 30 - 100 per week across sereral newspapers. Much better return.

Also, found the golden pages online pretty useless, however, the book is well worth a punt, as i believe that some people still use directories!!:D

Biggest waste of money for us was hurling/football/gaa wall calendar adverts. There are a few companies who mass produce these things that come out 400 times a year.
Online is where we put most of our advertising budget these days, with adwords getting great results of getting customers to our sites. If you are putting aside a decent budget for online advertising, first things first, spend money on a good seo service for the site. WASTE OF TIME otherwise.

Radio adverts (local, not national) done nothing for us either except left us out of pocket by a few thousand.

As other has said, spend wisely and haggle everyting. And keep a precise record of where your business is coming from. Ask everyone how they came across you and document it. After a while, you will notice trends and stuff like that. Best of luck with it.

mackeminexile

There are a few things going on now to be aware of.

1. Print advertising is suffering really badly due to the recession which means that ad space is not being booked and is very difficult to sell (even to long term repeat customers). As a result you can get some very good deals, especially by waiting till near the deadline. Most publishers will have dropped their rate card significantly in order to try to boost sales, so always remember that the initial price will drop. Also by holding till deadline, most mags etc will have unfilled space that you can give them a take it or leave it offer. Be wary of the 'readership' quotes. Ask for ABC figure and multiply it by 3.5 to get the readership

2. A lot of advertisers are steering their 'traditional' advertising budget into online pay per click ads as you can actually measure the return on investment. This area too is down on last year but is holding stronger than print.

There are some great deals to be had in both, so follow the business plan and find your target audience. If I can be any help let me know via pm. I've been in ad sales for a good long time and have an idea of the market etc.

chuck_g

Thanks for the helpful replies lads, has anyone used the likes of the Examiner etc.

How much for an advert in the Examiner or other Papers.

Cheers

Charlie

flash harry

Chuck

what sector? who are you aiming at i.e. b2b or b2c?

blue4ever

A full page colour in the Ex – is (RATE CARD) 20k!

So it depends on what size you want your ad to be and the extent on your budget. They charge by the col cm at 43.50 per col cm –m again - Rate card.

That's Main paper - cheaper rates in the supplements and weekender parts

Lot of time for the Examiner and the group as a whole, but it really is a Munster paper – not great penetration on the national Arena.

Their heartland really is Munster (read by half of one percent of the Dublin population). If your product or service is that way based, then have a chat with them. And have a chat with them about some of their regional titles as well. You might/will get a deal.

BnA

I would be very very slow to use any kind of print media advertising. We tried it a few times in a few industry magazines and we never once got a single response from them. You think before hand...."This is a good idea. I will take out an ad in a magazine read by the people I want to sell to..." But then, when you see the actual magazine, you ad is on a page with 3 more ads, in a magazine that is about 70% ads.

We had a review of our first 6 months of the year there last week. As part of the review we had a look at where our best 10 new customers of the first 6 months of 2009 came from.

We found that

• 5 came from referrals from existing customers
• 2 came from a new employee and friends he had in the industry. Networking I suppose you'd call it.
• 3 Came from Google.

So the first thing we learnt is obviously, your existing customers are your best advertisers. Treat them well and they'll spread the word.

But the second thing was Google... This was without paying for any adwords or anything. It was just through the normal Google search. My own backround is in software (although it is not an IT business) and about 2 years ago I done a half day course on Search Engine Optimization and applied what I learnt to our own website.

Although we were aware we were getting a bit of a return from the website, we didn't really know how much untill we started to look at it. Now that we have realised how valuable it can be to us, we have started to look at it a lot more closely. we have found that traffic has actually fallen on our website in the last 2 or 3 months because we took our eye off the ball and stopped updating it. So we have now started a complete review of the site to get it back up the google rankings and we have also started playing around with Adwords as well.

I think 20k for a newspaper ad is a huge amount of money. You could have a very very very good website up and running for a tenth of that. Just be very careful who you get to do it. There are a lot of "website designers" out there who haven't a clue what they are doing.

Even if you have an existing website that you are happy with, it might be worth getting some in to see what you can do to increase traffic to it.

P.S. A complete coincidence, but in the middle of writing this post, I actually got a phone call from a fella trying to sell ad space in a business magazine.

byrne0f56789

Word of mouth is your best shot. I think AdWords is a good start. Also, stay away from banner ads online. However, you need to read up on Internet Marketing to make it pay off.

Print advertising does not work very well for start-ups and small businesses.
This is because you have to test and measure lots of ads to get it right. Unfortunately, start-ups do not have the cash to do this.

However, as Seth Godin says, you must have something remarkable. If you can create this, then you are on to a winner. Think about putting your resources into being remarkable so that people who find you will tell their friends.