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Key questions
Your business
Here are a few things to consider about your business:
What products or services do you sell?
Make a list. We like to do this when designing another business' strategy, of course, since we don't know the business firsthand. But even when you're developing your own strategy, it's helpful to make a list of everything you sell as well. If there are a lot of things, break them up into general categories. Make
sure you include both products and services.
We're always surprised how often things don't make it into an ad that should only because the advertiser got so caught up in the design process that some of the products and services they offer simply slipped their mind.
What are your most popular products?
We like to look at this, but the answer can be deceiving, since sometimes
it's the advertising that's making certain products more popular,
when there are others that would sell even better if properly incorporated
into an ad.
What would you like to sell more of?
"Everything" is what we often hear. Other times, we're told the
products that just aren't selling, mainly because nobody needs them.
Be careful
not to feature items in your ad just because you need to get
rid of them, when
your target customers are very unlikely to buy them at any price.
How much is an average sale?
The number we look for here is an average of
what most of your sales are, not what an individual item costs.
For example,
a grocery
store's average price of their product may be two or three
dollars, but the average a customer spends might be fifty dollars.
In
other cases, such
as a restaurant, the average sale would not be the average
cost of an entree, but what would be spent by an average four-person
group,
including appetizers,
desserts, and beverages.
This is the number we look at when helping a business determine
what ad size might be reasonable to run, that is, what
size you'll be able
to run in order to make a return on investment. We have a separate article on our approach
to ad size. Keep in mind this is not a determining factor as
to what size
you should run.
An approach to determine that is also covered in that article.
Next: Competition
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