Advertising is one of those things that you simply must do for your business if it is to achieve success, but it’s also something to which different businesses may take drastically different approaches.
Of all of the questions to ask yourself about your business advertising, one of the biggest will be whether to farm out the responsibility to an external advertising or marketing agency, or instead do your company’s advertising yourself.
Agencies can be pricey, but advantageous
The attractions of a ‘do it yourself’ approach to advertising are obvious. Advertising agencies are often expensive, and you can never be quite sure what you will get for your outlay.
On the other hand, if you do give a dedicated advertising or marketing agency the responsibility of promoting your business, you will tend to pay a fixed fee for its services and have the assurance that the job is being handled by actual professionals with experience and a track record in this area.
Take the right approach, and DIY can be both cheap and effective
But what about taking a DIY approach to advertising your business? Well, there are definitely elements of this approach that can be highly cost-effective.
It doesn’t take any money at all to set up and start updating a Facebook or Twitter account, make routine posts to an online blog or launch an email marketing campaign.
However, if you don’t possess much experience or know-how in these areas, your efforts may be much less penetrating, and indeed may even damage your brand, compared to if you had handed responsibility for such tasks to a leading digital marketing agency.
Even the costs of DIY advertising can soon mount
There’s no doubt that basic online advertising techniques like the above can be very cheap and relatively easy to use yourself without external assistance. The downside of their sheer accessibility, however, is that seemingly everyone is using them.
Did you know, for example, that 93% of organisations use social media content as their main content marketing tactic? This suggests that even if your brand has a pretty good DIY social media presence, it may be merely ‘as good’ as plenty of your rivals, rather than the standout performer (for all of the right reasons) that it needs to be.
It is when your organisation realises this that it may start looking at certain other DIY advertising techniques, which is the point at which costs can quickly mount.
Did you know, for example, that a mere 2cm advertisement in the regional press could cost your business £400, or that if you would like to run a 30-second TV ad on just one occasion, you could be looking at a bill of between £15,000 and £100,000?
Always carefully consider the expense of DIY advertising
We haven’t just picked out those stats from thin air – they are sourced from an insightful infographic recently put together by the leading specialist in reservations software for hotels and B&Bs, eviivo.
The company also revealed that a one-time custom web design could set back businesses £5,000, and that even just the annual bill for web maintenance could cost a company £300 per annum.
The lesson here should be simple: while there are merits to taking on some of your company’s advertising yourself, this stubbornly independent approach isn’t always the most affordable or cost-effective one for your brand.
Indeed, external assistance with your company’s advertising can deliver a very significant ‘bang for your buck’, as shown in part by eviivo’s disclosure that for every £1 a hotel or B&B spends on a presence on a travel website such as Booking.com or LateRooms.com, they are guaranteed at least £5 of business.
In summary, be sure to plan your spending carefully when you are looking at the best advertising approaches for your own brand!