Five Characteristics of Highly Flawed Small Business Advertising
Behind every disappointing small business advertisement there is at least one reason for its failure. The good news is that any flaw with your advertising can be corrected, if you are willing to try new ideas.
Unless you are in the advertising business, chances are your strongest skills are not in advertising. If you are like many small business people, your small business advertisements are likely guilty of at least one of several common flaws.
Identifying what is wrong with your advertising is the first step toward making corrections that will result in greater response, increased revenue and stronger profits.
Following are descriptions of five common characteristics of highly flawed small business advertising. There are more, but correcting these will make for a great start.
Unfocused Market
Many small business owners make the mistake of thinking a bigger market is a better market when choosing where to run their ads. The result is they spend their advertising dollars to reach a larger but less focused market.
Are the places you choose to run your ad laser-focused on your market?
When your ads are focused squarely on your market you increase the likelihood that the readers who see your ad will actually have a need for your service. The more effectively you place your advertising in front of an ‘already interested’ market the more likely they will be predisposed to noticing and reacting to your ad, which is what you want.
For example, imagine your company specializes in helping law firms reduce the cost of prosecuting long, ongoing cases. If you choose to run a series of full page ads in the New York Times instead of the New York Law Journal you will likely be disappointed by the response to your campaign; despite reaching the considerably larger audience of the New York Times you would be missing the focused attention of the legal minded readership of the New York Law Journal.
How can you tell whether or not you can focus your advertising on a more receptive market?
Lack of Distinction
The next most common problem with small business advertising is that advertisements for companies in the same industry often fail to distinguish themselves from their competition.
How can you expect to win the lion’s share of your market if your advertisements pretty much look the same and contain the same elements as those of your competition?
Furthermore, distinguishing your company from your competitors is often made more difficult because, within a given advertising vehicle, advertisements for companies in similar industries appear virtually on top of each other. This scenario is particularly true for yellow pages listings and pay-per-click advertising. In order to succeed with your advertising your ads need to stand out and above those of your competition.
For example, if you are the owner of a pet supply company and your ads simply say, “We Sell Pet Supplies” they will be passed over along with every other bland advertisement for Fido’s food.
On the other hand, your ads will stand out and attract much more attention to your shop if you state that you sell, “King Sized Bones and Bowls for the Royalty in Your Family.” By focusing your ads on the owners of large breed dogs you distinguish yourself from the crowd of pet shops that simply sell pet supplies and make it clear to the owners of large dogs that you sell what they need.
Be sure the copy of your ads has the effect of making what you offer unique. Your highly targeted prospects will reward you by noticing the difference in your ads and buying from you.
Do your ads distinguish your business clearly above your competition?
Failure to Demonstrate Value
Another property of flawed advertising is that it fails to demonstrate the value of any products or services provided. By failing to demonstrate value in your advertisements you give your prospects only a foggy idea of the benefits you provide and no clear reason to buy from you. Demonstrating value will also help you set yourself apart from you competitors.
How can you change your ads to demonstrate the value you provide?
Too Much Focus on Products and Services
Consumers buy products and services because they fill a need or solve a problem. If your ad copy focuses too much on your company and the products and services you provide you miss your opportunity to demonstrate to your prospects that you provide the solution they need.
For example, imagine you are recovering from knee surgery and need to work with a physical therapist to regain your full range of motion. Would you be more likely to choose a therapist who advertises his new and modern equipment or the one who advertises that she will have your knee working and feeling like new again in just three weeks?
What should you focus your advertising on instead of your products and services?
Lack of a Clear Call to Action
A fifth characteristic of a highly flawed advertising is a lack of a clear call to action. An ad without a clear call to action is like calling 911 and not telling the operator where you are. Why bother calling?
Don’t assume that your prospects know what they should do once they’ve read your ad. You need to tell them to be sure they know.
If you’ve gotten their attention, demonstrated your value and shown them that you are the solution to their problem, don’t waste your good work by neglecting to instruct them to take the next step and contact you.
Move Your Marketing Forward™
Stop wasting money on ineffective advertising. If you are disappointed with the business your advertising generates why not take action to correct your dysfunctional ads?
9 Important Elements in a Service Level Agreement
It is a very frequent occurrence that the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is just an afterthought when preparing and negotiating a contract, and the buyer is usually waiting for the supplier to produce the SLA agreement. Of course, this leads to the situation in which the SLA actually protects the supplier, not the buyer.So here are the items one must do to achieve at least a reasonable if not good SLA:
Remember that any SLA is open for negotiation, but only in initial purchase- although the supplier may propose a very rigid position on the SLA (especially common in large companies), the SLA is part of the sales process. Standing by a rigid position should immediately raise red flags that the proposed “unchangeable” SLA is protecting the supplier, not the buyer. So the best opportunity to negotiate it is during the initial RFP negotiations. Once the product/service is sold and goes into production use, the buyer has lost all power of negotiation. So be very wary to agree that you will negotiate the SLA after delivery, end of warranty or some similar wording.
Define Availability as you would expect it – availability is usually calculated as a percentage of time the product under SLA is up and running. Usual numbers vary from 98% to 99.999% of the time. Now, let’s examine the “time” factor in the formula. Upon first reading, a person will usually interpret that 98% will be 98% of any time measure, whether it be hour, day, month, year, century…But let’s observe the following table:
In a SLA contract specifying a percentage of availability per time period, the total downtime is accumulated over the entire time period. Furthermore, if there is no time period specified in the availability percentage, the default time period is the period of the validity of the contract – which is very often 1 year or more. So, if you sign a yearly contract with an SLA of 99%, it doesn’t guarantee you that you will have at most 10 minutes of downtime per week. It means that you won’t have more then 3.65 days (or 86 hours) of downtime over the entire year, which means that you can have full 10 8-hour workdays WITHOUT ANY SERVICE in that year. If you take the same 99%, but insist on applying it on a weekly level, you suddenly get much better odds – now, you can’t have more then 1.68 hours of downtime in any of the days. So take a day of meetings in your company to define what is your maximum possible downtime per day, and use the above matrix to find the best option for you.
Always keep in mind the distinction between reaction time and correction time – During the negotiation of an SLA It is usual to have very tense negotiations to achieve a good “response time”. But this umbrella term is an excellent umbrella – for the supplier! Response time is defined as the time passing between formal logging of problem and until a representative from the supplier logs a response (sends a reply on e-mail, makes a phone call or arrives on-site). So when defining the response times, ALWAYS define two or three different times: reaction time - which is equivalent to response time, workaround time - the time in which it is expected to achieve a temporary solution which will alleviate the problem and correction time – the time in which it is expected that a final solution will be found.
Make precise definitions of problem severity levels and tie them in with reaction and correction times – as in my previous post, the severity of the problem can be viewed differently by the buyer and supplier. So, define a clear matrix of severity levels, and have a clause which states that if severity level differently, the view of the buyer prevails. A sample of severity levels are presented in the table below:
Define response time for all levels of severity - naturally, the buyer should expect faster reaction and correction for more severe problems. When defining the severity levels, in each one include at least the expected reaction time and workaround time.
Define channels of communication and escalation – At first glance a very simple thing, but one that is very often a reason for not being able to dispute the SLA contract. For the problem to be considered properly reported, the supplier will expect a report from an authorized person to specific persons via email, fax number or phone. Any deviation from the agreed upon process is an excellent reason for not meeting SLA parameters on the grounds of “not being informed”. So always have at least three authorized persons for problem reporting, and modify internal procedures so these persons are the first to be informed of a problem. The same is true for the escalation of problems to higher levels, should the problem persist.
Define the conditions under which the SLA criteria are applied to a problem - It is not uncommon in SLA agreements to see that the SLA criteria start to apply from the time of problem reporting from the buyer to the supplier. This is an element usually insisted upon by the supplier, since it offloads the burden of monitoring and reporting on the buyer. By the time the problem is reported, the actual problem is already existent for several minutes up to half an hour. Even more so, there are products for which the supplier cannot perform the monitoring and cannot conclude that a problem is occurring. So although this point will not be applied in the contract, adjust internal procedures so that the authorized persons of the buyer IMMEDIATELY report the problem to the supplier. Internal metrics can be even applied to this process, to identify internal lags in communication.
Define measurements and reporting - An SLA is useless if you can’t measure and document each problem length properly. So the buyer should keep track of problems, with info on the severity, duration of problem, reaction time and correction time, with all relevant e-mails and messages exchanged. Tracking can be achieved with something as simple as an excel sheet, all it requires is regular update.
Tie in penalties and contract back-out options – this is the actual big stick in the SLA. Breach of SLA parameters should be tied to serious penalties and possibility for contract termination. When defining penalties, always strive to define them in monetary value payable immediately upon breach of SLA. Also, you should try negotiate a penalty that has an exponential growth with each further hour of SLA breach. Do not accept a penalty to be compensated with other goods or services from the same supplier, since the supplier will value such services at sales price in the refund, while their internal costs for such services are significantly lower, thus reducing the actual loss of the supplier in SLA breach
Advantages and Disadvantages of Joint Venture
Smart entrepreneurs and business owners know that Joint Ventures are the fastest and most effective way to radically increase sales and profits with virtually no money and no risk, as long as its done correctly.
The Advantages of Joint Ventures are speed, access, sharing of resources and the leveraging of underutilized resources, high profits, back end income, low or no risk opportunities and massive leverage.
The Disadvantages of Joint Ventures are the possibility of being ripped off or disappointed by unscrupulous and unprofessional JV partners, and hurting your reputation and/or customers and associates by associating with the wrong people, even unknowingly.
There is a way to locate and contact really solid JV partners, however. The DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum might be the solution for you. We carefully screen Members and the support and education provided are very effective. For more information on the advantages and disadvantages of joint venture read below.