Every once in a while, someone throws you a real zinger. It's like if you were to come off the elevator and someone is standing there and says "excuse me, do you know where the elevator is?"
Has that ever happened to you? Someone says something so astonishing that you're standing there scratching your head not really knowing how to respond?
Recently I was talking to a business owner here in Milton. I won't disclose the type of business or who it was because my point here is definitely not to offend anyone.
The business in question spends about $12,000 per year on advertising. Most of it is in newspapers - about $800 per month or so. The rest is doing miscellaneous stuff that by their admission provides no measurable results for their business.
Their $800 or so per month newspaper budget is spread between two local newspapers. They occasionally get appointments booked from one of the papers when they advertise specific offers and promotions and the other one "never generates any phone calls"; although people do mention it so there's obvious brand recognition value. The point I'm getting at is that they are spending about $800 per month with no way to know how many people actually SEE the ad not to mention how many actually READ it. They get extremely minimal actual RESULTS from it and yet they continue spending their money on this medium that is providing very little value to their business.
So in our conversation, I suggested that they do pay per click advertising for their business in Milton. I was able to provide local search activity on Google that found that over 4000 people in Milton were searching for their services each month and that their site was only being shown for about 20% of the time to all that potential traffic because their website is poorly optimized. Pay per click advertising would guarantee that their website appears on the first page of Google EVERY time someone locally searches for those phrases and that they would ONLY pay for it if people actually clicked on it and visited their website!
I should mention that the product/service that this company offers is very competitive, but that there is very low competition on Google so from my experience, this would be the absolute best marketing they would ever invest into. Now here comes the kicker... the thing like I mentioned above about the elevator question....
They said "why would we want to pay for traffic to our website?" Now in their industry, for $800 per month, they would be getting at least 3000 visitors to their website each month from Pay Per Click Advertising. We probably couldn't even spend their whole budget; I don't think we'd actually get that much traffic.
But let's assume that only 1000 visitors came from pay per click and it cost them about $250 on that, which is very realistic in their industry. A BAD website should convert at about 1% to 2%. Let's say that that $250 advertising budget converted a very poor 1% or 10 new customers.
In their business, their average order is about $125 and people use their product at least 6 times per year. That means that those 10 customers that cost $250 to get are worth $7500 per year to their business. Multiply that out and after 12 months, their business would have grown by over $90,000 per year in sales - for a $250 per month advertising budget.
I think the real question is, "Why on Earth wouldn't you pay for traffic to your website?