When is the time right to spend money on advertising?
When should you launch an ad campaign?
Everywhere you look you see advertising. Every media bombards you. Could this tool – advertising – help make businesses more profitable? Could advertising be helping you? If you are reluctant to spend money on advertising, it may be because you haven't asked yourself, and answered, these three questions:
- When should I advertise?
- What should I advertise?
- How should I advertise?
When should you advertise?
The answer is easy: "when you have something to advertise." But "having something" requires your taking a hard look at your business and asking yourself, "Do I have at lest one product or service that is selling profitably now and might get even more orders if I were to advertise it?"
In spite of stories you might have heard about advertising selling the unsellable, advertising rarely can make an unwanted product profitable. Don't advertise until you have proof that a product or service you offer can – and has – made sales. If you don't yet have at least one product or service that sells profitably, you're not ready to spend money to run advertising.
You may ask, "how can I make sales without advertising?" but there are many ways to expose your products to the public without paid advertising and, if no amount of exposure results in sales, you're not ready to spend money on advertising. First you have to get your act together and make your product desirable. This may mean writing a more compelling description for it, or showing it off with a better photograph, or getting enthusiastic testimonials for it, even if you have to give away a few bottles of your fragrance to get those testimonials.
Before you begin to spend money on advertising, be confident you have a product that will sell.
What should you advertise?
For some, under some circumstances, just advertising your business could make sense. For most of us advertising a single product from our business makes more sense.
If, from experience, you can predict that a new customer will buy from you again and again, consider advertising a "loss leader," a popular product you can offer at a conspicuously low price. This strategy attracts as many new customers as possible and you do it with the knowledge that the additional business you receive from them will more than offset the minimal profit or small loss you get from their initial orders.
Before you experiment with a loss leader, make some estimate of the profit that will be produced by future orders from these customers. This is a long range strategy and one that calls for record keeping that will allow you to estimate what a customer is worth to you in profit over the weeks, months, or years they continue to shop with you.
But suppose you have a small number of products to offer and experience shows that most new customers don't give you a second order or, if they do, it's a long time in coming. In this situation you'll want to maximize your profit on the first and possibly only order. Look for a product that sells well and yields a generous profit from each sale. This will probably be your "best" product and it's the one you want to advertise.
How should you advertise?
Ideally you will begin by running test ads in several media with several messages to see what works best for you. If your budget is extremely limited you may do better to put all your eggs in one basket rather than spreading the money so thin that any results you get will be too small to analyze. For starters, go with the media that can give you the most bang for your buck. You don't yet know what it is so you must take a shot in the dark with an advertising program you can comfortably afford and where you can quickly cut your spending if necessary. Give consideration to Google Ads, Amazon Advertising, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. Think about media where you see ads that are most closely related to what you are selling.
Set up a budget that will allow your ads to run over a period of weeks but won't break you should the program prove a failure.
Study at the media you have selected. Look at the product you have selected. Write about it just using the ideas you would use if you were selling it in person. Keep it simple. Keep your focus on how the product could help someone.
If advertising is new to you, the two most important points are selecting appropriate media – placing your ads in media that makes sense for your offer – and the offer itself. A good offer made in the right media can sell a product far better than all the work of "creative" advertising people when they promote a poor offer in the wrong media. Writing and photography skills are secondary to common sense selling.
Keep these two points in mind. My own current advertising program is focused on selling a single product, this book: Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!.
Homemade perfumes generally lack commercial value, regardless of how wonderful they may be, because their creators fail to record how their perfumes were made. To profit from a perfume, to sell it, to sell the rights to it, or have somebody sell it for you, you must be able to make more of it. To make more you need the formula, the record of how the perfume was made: what materials were used and how much of each material was used. While the formula is nothing more than a recipe, a simple piece of paper, it is the key to unlocking your perfume's commercial potential. With the formula in your hand you have the ability to make a few dozen bottles more or, like the celebrities, tens of thousands of bottles. How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume is a guide to getting you started on the right foot, correctly documenting everything you do as you are doing it, and then using these notes with some basic mathematics to write a simple, accurate, universal formula for your perfume. Writing formulas for your perfumes can change the way you think about them. With your formulas in hand your creations are no longer "here today, gone tomorrow." Now, thanks to your library of formulas, your perfumes become immortal!
While much is written about perfume – the beautiful fragrances... the beautiful bottles – little is available on the "mechanics" of perfume production – the steps that take place on the "factory floor" where a beautiful vision is turned into a finished product, a "ready to sell" perfume. Now you can experience all of these steps, hands on, by making just one quart of your own perfume. If you follow each chapter and do what you are instructed to do, you will end up with from 8 to 64 bottles of your own perfume, depending on the capacity of the bottles you select. Along this "insiders journey," each step is profusely illustrated with professional color photographs and you'll learn — • Exactly what alcohol you'll need and where to get it • Why you'll want (just a little!) water in your perfume • What type bottles you'll need and why you cannot use others • Why you will use a spray and not a cap • How to fill and seal your bottles • How to label your bottles with the correct information so they will be legal for sale • How to select a name for your perfume that will allow you to acquire powerful trademark rights free. If you are a developer of scents you are encouraged to use one of your own for this project. If you are not a scent creator yourself you'll learn how to get a fragrance oil that is exactly right for this project. Online sources are given for all required supplies and materials. Nothing can hold you back from starting your project immediately!
Perfume is famous for the markup it can achieve, even for a middle market fragrance. While "everybody knows" that perfume costs next to nothing to make (not completely true) the making of it is often considered an esoteric secret. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" details how a 3-person company with no experience created their own fragrance in response to a marketing opportunity that was too good to pass up. The book explains exactly what was done to create a fragrance for that opportunity but it is far more than a history of the author's project. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" lays out every step in the process of creating your own perfume, either as a do-it-yourself project – and without the benefit of automated equipment some compromises and workarounds are required – or full bore professional production under your supervision. Either way you will be producing a quality fragrance at a remarkably low cost. Do you have a marketing opportunity that would be wildly profitable if only you could obtain your fragrance at a ridiculously low cost? "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" is the guide you need to do it.
Now when you make your own perfume you can make it fully "commercial" meaning you will be creating a product ready for regular, continuous sales to friends, relatives, and the public! If the fragrance you've made has already won praise, why not share it with others? Some might pay you for it and want it for their web stores or retail boutiques! Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles: Methods, mechanics, and mathematics guides you through steps that can turn your hobby project into a perfume business. Discover how close you are now and how little more you must do to take what you made with essential oils and dropper bottles into a business of your own! For an introduction to this book, watch this video.
You can build a perfume business of your own using this business plan as a guide. By following its detailed strategy you learn to identify motivated groups of potential perfume buyers. Members of these groups are near the tipping point of desire for a new perfume. You don't know these people and they don't know you but you know a marketer they trust, one who does not currently sell perfume and might never think of selling perfume were it not for your approach. Here is where you step in with a professional plan, promotion, and perfume to take advantage of this ripe opportunity for mutual profit. Before your first promotion has peaked, you will already be developing a relationship with your next marketing partner. Following this plan, you will gain more and more profit with each new marketing partnership.
A really great name, a special name that is just right for a particular perfume or perfume marketer (or entrepreneur with money to invest!) can be worth a ton of money. But few individuals with great ideas ever manage to cash in on those brilliant ideas. Instead they wait while others "discover" their idea, acquire legal rights to it and make all the money while they are left out in the cold without a penny having been earned for what was once THEIR idea.
If you are struggling to name your perfume and are looking for a name that will have real value, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will help you weed out low value names and point you to names that have better marketing value plus the potential to become valuable assets in themselves.
If you have a great name you want to protect but no fragrance, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will guide you through the simple steps you must take to acquire a legal right to that name before someone else grabs it! Best of all, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" shows you how to gain strong legal protection for your name without a lawyer and without spending more than pocket change.
Never had an idea for a product name? Never thought much about perfume? "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" may stimulate your interest in a whole new game that, when played well, can make you lots of money without your having to leave the comfort of your home office.
When you name a perfume you create a valuable asset – the name itself. To sell your perfume you want the most effective name possible. But a good name can have value beyond the edge it gives your sales. In naming your fragrance you are creating a trademark and a trademark can have value independent of the product. The value of that trademark can vary. Much depends on how well, in naming your perfume, you follow the trademark "rules." How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume first helps you develop a name that will be effective in selling your perfume. It then prods you to make use of certain techniques that can turn a good name into a great trademark, strong and valuable. If you have questions about how to protect a name, How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume will answer many such as:
- Can you protect your name yourself or do you need a lawyer?
- Can you register a trademark without a lawyer?
- What does it cost to register a trademark?
- How do I enforce the rights I have established?
How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume covers both state, federal, and international protection.
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Philip Goutell
Lightyears, Inc.
