Realistic Expectations About Your Advertising Dollars

Business owners often arrive with a hope that very little advertising can meet: one ad, or one short run, and the phones start ringing. A brand-new business that nobody has heard of expects to sell like a household name. A small budget is expected to produce what a competitor gets from spending far more every month. Smaller advertisers are often under real pressure to see a quick payback, so their patience tends to run out just when it is needed.

The trouble is how people actually respond to advertising. They notice what is familiar, they trust what they have seen before and they are protective of their money. An unfamiliar name has to earn all three, and that takes repeated exposure over time. A single clever message cannot shortcut it.

Concentrate the money into a short, loud burst

The first option is to spend a large share of the budget, or all of it, in a short period so that the market hears about you repeatedly and close together. This saturation approach suits moments with a natural deadline: a grand opening, a major sale, the introduction of a new product or an enrollment period. The message is everywhere for a while, and people who need what you offer during that window are likely to have heard it. The trade-off is that the effect fades once the spending stops, so plan for what comes next.

Spread small amounts over a long period

The second option is the opposite: modest amounts spent steadily over a long time, dividing the budget into small sums for each campaign. It takes patience, but it builds recognition and trust gradually. When people eventually need what you sell, they search for it and recognize your name, or they stand in front of a shelf of similar choices and yours is the one they have heard before.

What tends not to work is the combination many small advertisers fall into by default: a very small budget spread over a very short time. It is too thin to be noticed and too brief to become familiar. Picture a business that runs a couple of radio spots, sees no flood of calls and decides that radio does not work. What failed was the expectation. Radio is one example, but the same holds for a handful of social posts, a single mailing or one billboard flight. A medium needs enough frequency and enough time to do its job before you can judge it fairly.

Picture a shopper in the laundry aisle. A few weeks earlier they may have heard one radio ad for a new detergent, but they were not really listening, and it left no impression. Now the shelf holds several brands they have used or heard about for a long time, and one name they do not know. Few people give the unknown name a second look. They buy what they recognize, what is on sale or what they have always bought.

The lesson is that familiarity has to come before the sale. Make people listen, make them remember you, give them reasons to trust you, and only then can you expect to be chosen. That is why advertising is judged by return on investment: a small investment of money and time brings a small return, a larger investment is more likely to bring a larger one, and either way you are taking a risk in the hope of a reward. It can be discouraging to hear, but there is relief in it too, because a steady, modest investment over a long period takes the strain off finding a large budget all at once.

Which approach fits you, and what you should expect from it, depends on several things at once.

• The business and what it sells, including how often customers buy and how long they take to decide.
• How well known your name already is in your market.
• The type of advertising, since radio, television, outdoor, search, social and email each behave differently.
• Who your audience is and where they spend their time.
• Your location and the size of the area you serve, whether that is a few neighborhoods or the wider Atlanta area.
• The budget, and how much of it you can commit for how long.

Work through these honestly, on your own or with an advisor. They decide whether a burst or a steady schedule makes more sense, and how much of either you can afford. Be wary of anyone who promises fast results from a very small, very short campaign; realistic advice includes saying what a budget cannot do.

Before a campaign begins, write down what you will count as a response: calls, visits, quote requests, sign-ups or sales. Settle on the length of the run, and the date of your first review, before the campaign starts. Compare it only with what it could reasonably achieve in that time. Ask each new customer where they first came across you, remembering that the ad that finally prompts a call often gets the credit for exposures that came before it. If the plan is sound and the response is still low after a fair test, change the message, the medium or the audience, one at a time, and look again. Our marketing analytics page explains how to track those responses.

From his start as a radio announcer and sales representative, Kirk Donovan took away an early lesson: retail advertising has to do more than chase ratings, demographics and cute creative copy, because its job is to get a response from people. Taken seriously, that principle cuts both ways. An advertisement should be judged by the response it produces, and a response is something you can expect only after the audience has had the chance to notice, remember and trust you. If radio is on your list, start with our page on radio advertising; for the other channels, see media buying. For the money side of the question, read five ways to maximize your advertising budget, and find the rest of this series in the same topic collection.