Does press advertising really work for small business?

It's true that with the proliferation of online advertising choices, that traditional advertising has become much more cost effective, and therefore easier to access for the small business.

BUT does it work?

The jury is still out so far as I'm concerned. I know that there are many factors involved in whether an advert works or not. Target market, publication, message, product or service, social influences, economic pressures, style of presentation - the list of excuses goes on and on. The 'need to know' is, does press advertising work for small businesses?

With all those factors coming in to play the only way to know for sure is to test it out, and with it being so much cheaper these days this makes sense. Dip a toe in and if it doesn't work then cut your losses or adjust some of the components and see if it works next time. The adjust and test process is pretty much what every single advertising agency does with every single client, every single time they place an advert. The only difference is, it's not their own money they are using to experiment with - it's yours!

There's no doubt that there are people who are better at advertising than others but even those 'advertising geniuses' don't have all the answers. With society and technology as complex as it is these days how can anyone profess to be an expert with all honesty. There are no real experts anymore, just individuals with more experience of what can go wrong (as well as what works). The sign of a good creative advertiser is someone who finds a formula that works well and still tries to develop it (rather than sticking with the same old formula every time).

As I suggested I think the only real way to find out what works for you and your business is to test it out. So here is my live action test for Whype design. Below you will see an advert that we placed in a local Bristol based lifestyle magazine called 'Area'. It is aimed at a very specific affluent area in Bristol which is more likely to have a good number of business owners and leaders. We thought that this would most likely be a good publication for this reason, but also because as an introductory offer the advertising rates were great. We also looked at the competition in the publication - there seemed to be one other creative agency regularly advertising in the magazine but they had a slightly different offer to us. The signs seem good - not too saturated with competitors but someone else obviously felt it was of value.

The magazine came out at the beginning of February so it's too early to tell if there will be any positive outcome from it yet. We have included a 20% off your final bill offer during February as an incentive. Let's see if it works?

If you have thoughts about how we could improve the advert to make it work better please let us know?