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Doing advertising well is more challenging than ever before. There are thousands of ways to target consumers, and the choices can be confusing and hard to navigate. Done properly, advertising has a powerful impact on your top line, and it leaves distinct marketplace impressions with your most important audiences. Done improperly, advertising can drain away valuable resources and make a questionable contribution to a company’s success.

If dramatic revenue gains are at stake, consider these five tips for doing the very best that you can with your advertising investment:

Know you competitors, especially those who have a head start in your marketplace. Most companies do a poor job of tracking their competitors’ strategies and how they change over time. Take advantage of all their knowledge by tracking their programs and budgets. If your competitor is repeating a campaign, you can bet it is working for them. Learn from their success.

Start every year by planning ahead. Challenge every assumption. Simply doing what was done last year and adding 5% leads to advertising programs of questionable value. Evaluate the success of each advertising initiative, look for ways to cut marginal activities, and concentrate dollars into programs that make clear contributions to your success.

Avoid the 1000 drops in 1000 buckets syndrome. The smaller the budgets, the more things people try to achieve with them. There is a lot of comfort in doing many things. However, the feeling of being very busy is often mistaken for being very productive. Avoid wasting ad dollars on tiny ads that lack impact and don’t give your company visibility. Don’t spread your message too thinly across too many media. Concentrate your dollars on the few things that when done well have the power to move your market.

Put the right person in charge of your ad program. The best advertising people are innovators by nature. They are also bridge-builders who work well with other departments and external partners. They look for ways to get more and more impact for the dollars you spend and have courage to try new things. Choosing someone with advertising experience in more than one industry leads to more informed decisions.

Bill Fritsch is president of Hydrogen Advertising, an award-winning, Seattle-based advertising agency emphasizing superb ideas efficiently produced. Reach him at 206-389-950o, ext. 24 or email bill@hydrogenadvertising.com. For more information, visit http://www.hydrogenadvertising.com.

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If you spend even a dime of your budget on “image” advertising, then this article will show you why you’re throwing your money away, and what you can do instead to double — even triple — your sales in the next 30 days or less.

I want you to imagine two door-to-door sales reps starting their first day on the job. They both work for the same company, sell the exact same product and are in virtually identical neighborhoods selling their widgets. The only difference between the two is the way they go about selling their product.

The first sales rep (we’ll call him Sales Rep #1) goes around the neighborhood he is working wearing a fancy suit and driving around in a flashy car with his company’s logo, slogan and website address written all over it. He just drives around the neighborhood all day. Never stopping at any houses and never talking to anyone on a personal level.

The other sales rep (we’ll call him Sales Rep #2), on the other hand, does the exact opposite. He has neither a nice looking suit or flashy car. In fact, his suit is 30 years old, his pants are too short and his car is so old and beaten up, it has a coat hanger as an antenna.

And so he has no choice but to “slug it out” door-to-door and face-to-face, knocking on every door, wedging his foot inside every time the door opens, giving his pitch, telling his story and making his case one house at a time. Eventually stopping at each house in the neighborhood.

Now, really, if your life was on the line, and you HAD to pick which of the two sales reps will make the most money — who would you stake your life on?

Sales Rep #1 in the fancy car driving around randomly and not knowing if anyone is even noticing or listening to him? Or Sales Rep #2, who may not be the best-kempt fellow in the world, but who goes door-to-door making his full pitch (and actually asking for the sale) one house at a time?

Here’s the point: Image advertising, slogans, fancy logos and relying on technology to make the sale for you is no different than what Sales Rep #1 does. It’s expensive, useless and even obnoxious in some cases.

On the other hand, using the tried and true methods of direct response advertising, finding your prospects, getting their attention, telling your story and asking for the sale — while not sexy — has much bigger “teeth.” It will also make you a lot more money, and will put you head and shoulders above your richer, fancier and more technlogically savvy competitors every single time.

Ben Settle is an expert copywriter and direct marketer. If you liked this article then check out Ben’s website at http://bensettle.com — where you’ll find over 500 pages of advertising ideas, strategies and tactics just like this one — as well as rare swipe file ads and hot marketing information not easily found anywhere else.

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