Where to put your Ad $$$'s?

[Reedwalker]

I spend a fortune in advertising.

Yellowbook ad, Blue Book ad, Yellowpages.com ad

In the service ads for residentioal customers I have never broke even. The Blue Book has paid off. I mean if you hit one home run in commercial construction it can pay for that ad for years.

What kind of success/failure are you guys having with your ads? Anybody do direct mailing or val-pak coupons and have success?

[Chris]

At my company twice a year we mail out a post card with all of our info on it to every General Contractor in our area and it has produced some decent results over the years. This last time not so much but I think alot of that has to do with the economy and the amount of competition.

[lordofthepipes]

for us advertising is everything, we are in all of it, web, yellowbook, dex, and local books. when we started up two years ago we thought ok, we will have a full page ad in one of the biggest books and we will AT LEASE 2 calls a day for it...........no. we got by the first few months on pure luck. it was at this time that we got into more books, and that is hard when you dont have calls to sign up at 800-1200 per month per book but we did it. put up or shut up right. well it worked. started to get calls first from the web (google ad words) then the books, two years later we still have day,days,weeks that are slow and at this point we spend north of 10 grand a month to keep the phone ringing but we are able to make the nut and we posted a profit last year! wont do that again ouch!

[Caduceus]

The last company that I worked for showed that majority of new business came from internet ads and searches. When talking one on one with the customer they would usually do a check up on the company after seeing the ad by going to Yelp, Angie's List, BBB, etc. They may mention a few companies that had bad reviews so didn't call them. At our meetings it would be discussed how advertising costs go down the drain when dissatisfied customers post on the internet, so it would be good to check your own reviews to be sure somebody isn't spitefully hurting your business and wasting your money.
As a consumer that sits within the home owner w/kids, 35-45 years old, married type of demographic, we look online as a fast resource where we can check reviews, coupons and see a variety of services before picking up the phone. Heck, I've mentioned coupons from the 'green pages' of the phone book and most customers don't have a phone book or know where it is. Hope my two cents gave you some ideas.