Do you know WHY you're advertising?

A recent conversation brought some latent thoughts to mind. The person in question was lamenting over their advertising activity. "We do lots of local advertising", they said, "but don't really see any return from it".

Well, there's a couple of instant thoughts that drifted up from that. Firstly, how do you measure the impact of your advertising activity? This could be as simple as watching sales figures before, during and after your advertising campaign. And I do use the word campaign deliberately here - there's no point in doing a one-off advert just because it's cheap... I've mentioned this before. But what about asking people what brought them in to the shop today? Maybe an offer promoted by the advert would help?

The other thought was "do you know why you're advertising... what's it for?". We asked this, and pointed out that if they didn't know the answer to this question then they should probably stop their advertising spend until they knew the answer.

Advertising is an effective technique for building awareness. If you need to increase the foot-fall in your shop, then making more people aware of your presence would be good, while reminding existing customers that you're still there will help too.

So, yes, advertising should ultimately drive increased sales, but you do need to be a bit more specific, otherwise you won't know what the adverts will look like or how to know if they're doing a good job. Without an advertising strategy, it's a little like the United Nations spending months to finally agree to say that people should really be a bit nicer to each other. Don't get me started...