Business Solutions

Carmine’s Restaurant serves everything family style with tons of food and tons of garlic, and in order to get into Carmine’s, the restaurant only accepts a minimum reservation of six in a party, so in other words, if you want to go to the restaurant you need to do the work and sell six of your friends to even get in.

You can save considerable sums of money if you realize the cost of radio and Television time is always negotiable, so remember, if ad space on radio or TV is not sold, it is wasted forever, therefore stations will usually accept prices far below their normal ones, and large advertisers know that “rate cards” are works of fiction, but small advertisers often believe what they see on the cards. Never forget to always negotiate ad space.

Don’t feel that you need to constantly change your advertising campaign, since it requires you to spend more production money and it dilutes the overall effectiveness of your marketing, so stick with one campaign until it loses its pulling power. In fact, let your accountant tell you when to change your ads, since they are the only ones that study your profit picture and after all, this is what really matters.

Your local radio station or newspaper may not want what you are selling, but they do want something, and in all likelihood, you can trade with someone who has what the media wants, and If so, you’ll get your media ads for a fraction of their usual cost, since you’ll be paying with your own services or goods at their retail price.

Many suppliers pay cash fees to small advertisers who mention their name or show their logo in their ads, and co-op advertising not only saves money, but also lends creditability to their offerings by mentioning the name of a nationally known company, so talk to your suppliers and simply ask them about their co-op program, and if they don’t have one ask them to start one.

A.P.I. (per inquiry) or P.O. (per order) arrangement is a great way to save on advertising, and through this arrangement no money actually changes hands until you actually sell something. Magazines, television, and radio stations would provide no cost advertising space to you in exchange for a percentage of your sales, and in this way, you can engage in high-level marketing with virtually no upfront costs other than production costs.

A vast amount of research has proven that you can accomplish almost as much with a thirty second commercial as you can with a sixty-second commercial. So save money by cutting the verbiage and saying your message in half a minute, and also, apply this thinking to your print efforts. You can attract more business by running small, inexpensive, but routine newspaper (online) or magazine ads (online), and while you might not look as important as the purchasers of full-page ads, you’ll end up making more money.

Because of the way magazines are printed, publishers think in terms of four-page units because it takes one large piece of paper folded in half to make four pages that fit into the magazine format, and often a magazine will have sold only three pages as publication dates draw near, so the publisher will sometimes sell this space at an amazing discount to a local advertiser.