Advertising in the New Year
When, Where and How By Vern Cole, Hair Restoration Institute of DFW, Fort Worth, Texas
There are several times throughout the year when advertising presents a larger-than-life opportunity to generate new sales leads and new business. First and foremost, among these windows of opportunity are January and February. It’s “New Years Resolution” time, the holidays are behind us, and people are focused on selfimprovement and feeling better about themselves. So, the question is what is the most effective means of advertising during this period, and what is the best time to do it to get the biggest bang for your buck. First, ask yourself what type of advertising are you looking at: off-line, traditional advertising — radio, television, cable — online digital advertising, or some combination of both, since this clearly affects your budget. Once you determine where you want to place your ad dollars, you have to ask yourself how many ad dollars per month you are going to budget for you to see the results you need.
Monitoring Your Results In recent years, I have found 10
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that online advertising has given me the biggest bang for my adverting dollar, and in particular, targeted pay-per-click advertising. There are numerous online opportunities for PPC advertising, the biggest of which is Google. But there are also other platforms that can be effective as well, so it pays to look around. That being said, one of the most important things you have to do when advertising is monitor the results to see what is working and what is not pulling in the leads you want, and regularly make adjustments in your campaigns. Let’s face it. In the hair replacement industry, the nucleus of our business is lead generation — pulling in the number of new leads you want so that you can continue to grow and prosper. If you aren’t generating leads and turning them into sales and clients, with ongoing sales to those clients, you are not going to see growth. That is why each month I meet with my web and social media team who manage the effectiveness of my online advertising and marketing to evaluate how well our ad campaigns are working in driving prospects to our website and converting website visitors into opportunities. If you are on a limited budget, online advertising is the way to go since traditional advertising — radio, TV, cable — is more expensive. Radio and TV, of course, have the potential to make you look bigger. It helps your image, but still, the bottom line is getting people to go to your website. You must have an effective, compelling website that makes it as alluring and as easy as possible for them to give you their contact information. People often tell me they can’t afford traditional broadcast advertising. It all comes down to budget and budget allocation. If you can’t afford radio, TV and cable, maybe just go with radio. Radio can be effective, particularly if you have a vanity phone number such as (123) 456-HAIR. Combine that with an effective tagline and just constantly emphasize that telephone number and tagline in all your advertising. Repetition is brand building.
