I’ll Just Try One
…and why my heart sinks when I hear it
I know what you’re thinking – no I do – no really!
If you are, or have ever contemplated print advertising, particularly if you are a small business or a start-up, your money is fast dwindling after all the other demands on your poor pennies but you know you have to get the word out there.
Perhaps your social media pages are taking a bit of time to grow, or you have noticed that because of some kind of algorithm hocus pocus your posts just don’t get seen but every month you see a print magazine land on your doorstep, they deliver to your ideal customers and you think hmmm perhaps I’ll give that a try.
Print advertising is affordable but how do you know if it will work right? So you think…
I know I will just try one to test the waters
did you know every time you say that a magazine publisher loses their little editor wings? – TRUE FACT
You only say that because you want to sell more!
Of course we want to sell more adverts, that’s what our business is about but we don’t just print one edition and disappear, most small magazines have been around for years, (I’ve been going since 2012) BUT (MASSIVE BUT), if we sell more adverts and they don’t work we wouldn’t get repeat advertisers and 75% of my advertisers have been with me for years. It makes sense for me to give you the best advice – if it works you will repeat.
Just suppose you trust me for a moment.
Here is why “just trying one” makes my heart sink.
Think for a moment about how you shop. Imagine you are going to buy a pair of curtains because you are moving to a new house.
You are now in a stage of buying that psychologists call Recognition. Before you reached this stage (pre-need) nothing about curtains were of interest to you – I could have stood outside your front door waving a flag saying “buy your curtains here” and you might have called the police but you wouldn’t have thought oh goody curtains. However, now you are in Recognition mode – well it is almost as though curtain adverts are everywhere – everywhere you look things about curtains are leaping out at you.
You then enter a phase of information gathering and looking at alternatives before
finally reaching a BUYING DECISION and then actually BUYING
Two months has passed since you first entered the recognition phase – you go to pick up the latest edition of that magazine and look for the advert you saw and it is not there.
If you are the advertiser you will turn to me and say it didn’t work and nothing I will say then will convince you!
The long and short of it is that people rarely see an advert and pick up the phone then and there (unless it’s an emergency plumber). Your potential customers go through a lot of processes before that happens and your advert will be a reminder at each step of that decision and that is why…
I recommend trying at least 3 editions with any size advert.
PS: the other aspect of repeat advertising is trust. When a reader sees your advert appear regularly in their trusted local magazine they believe you too are trusted and not a ‘come and go’ kind of business.
