Advertising Advice you Won’t Get From An Advertising Sales Person

Advertising Advice you Won’t Get From An Advertising Sales Person

Advertising sales people may be telling you now is the best time to advertise for some of the following reasons.

• People are having to stay at home. So they are spending more time with media giving advertisers more exposure
• This is a great time to build awareness for your business while the audiences are larger and spending more time with media
• Advertising rates are down in some media, so you can get more for your money

All of the above is true. But what if you wait it out?

Many small businesses need to see a return on their advertising costs and cannot spend much if business is not coming in. We believe only larger businesses with image advertising budgets or smaller businesses that may be in a very competitive market should spend on building and maintaining awareness.

Another issue with advertising now to build top of mind awareness is, when will the Pandemic be over? If a business can afford to advertise to build image enhancement, how long can they keep advertising without much business coming in? If the pandemic lasts much longer than the image ads, when the Pandemic ends much of the awareness may be lost.

This is why we have told many of our clients to wait until we are sure the Pandemic will be over soon to start advertising. In the meantime, they can use their social media or email to maintain awareness of their businesses.

For our clients that do most or all of their business on line, we are continuing to advertise for them since the Pandemic will not effect their ability to make sales. In fact with some online businesses the Pandemic may help. Amazon? In the meantime we are encouraging our clients to use their email marketing lists to stay in touch. For some of our clients we are suggesting that they use this time to build their email marketing lists by doing low cost Facebook promotions where they can gather emails.

Finally, some businesses may be open but have to operate in a different way or may be perceived as being closed. In this case it may be a good time to advertise. For example a car dealer may not be open, but they may still be offering service, or a business may have been closed due to the Pandemic initially, but has reopened even though the Pandemic is still going on. In these instances it would be good if not necessary to advertise.

The Take Away

Our over-all recommendations are to use the Pandemic to your advantage. If you are a large business that has a good image advertising budget, this is a great time to be out their in the media. If you have a business that does all or most of it’s business online, keep advertising or maybe even increase it. For businesses that are having to do business differently due to the Pandemic, or businesses that may be open but people think they are closed, advertising may be necessary. But if you are a business that does not have an image advertising budget and the Pandemic has either closed your business or you are unable to sell your product or service during the Pandemic for any reason . . . WAIT.