# Where should I spend my advertising monies?



## silverbolt (Aug 11, 2005)

Good Morning!
I am so happy I decided to become a member of this forum more than 5 years ago. Everyone on here is so great and helpful. That being said, let me ask you a question: If you had $1,000 to spend on marketing and advertising, where would you spend it? How about $500? I have a little money to spare for some advertising and marketing, so I just wanted your valued opinions. Things I am considering: Facebook ads,Yellow pages (online),radio commercials. Of course, like us all, I don't want to waste money and buy print ads that really don't work. I would appreciate any and all feedback,
Desiree AKA Silverbolt


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## printingray (Apr 4, 2012)

I think You can market without money if you have pretty knowledge about SEO, if you have online business you don't need to invest on PPC just do SEO and rank your targeted keywords in the return you got good traffic as well customers.


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## CoryJP (Oct 27, 2010)

Facebook has been good to us, but it's definitely not great for other industries, probably less so serviced based. I'm thinking Google Adwords should be effective for most.


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## royster13 (Aug 14, 2007)

Spend your money on samples that are delivered door to door to potential clients....


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## Riderz Ready (Sep 18, 2008)

There is no single answer as your market and niche will determine what will be the most effective tools for you to use. SEO has become virtually useless in the t-shirt jungle as regardless what you do you will never remotely get close to the front pages Facebook has taken huge hits with recent articles discusing how infrequent users click an ad. Adwords is great if you know how to use it and have a spefici niche to target. 

One thing you can do immediately is to have a link in your signature to your site and Facebook page. Also looked at your site briefly - drop the ads on the side. Website is everything and placing ads for other businesses is tacky and not professional plus your competitors can pop up as well.

Define your market first than look for ways to best attack that niche.

Best of luck.


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## beanie357 (Mar 27, 2011)

Listings in all the local style search engines help, but won't get you near the top. The pay for click folks are all above the fold nowdays.

Signage for your shop is a must. 
We use the most popular freebie paper with an 1/8 page.
We also signed up for yellowbook print. Yes, people still use it occasionally. But it's an ongoing montly expense.
A good website is a must, but today you need ancillary advertising to get people to go to it.
Good signage, good website, start the local listing slog, and you will have toasted your 1k.
Even facebook needs to be fed somehow.


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## silverbolt (Aug 11, 2005)

CoryJP said:


> Facebook has been good to us, but it's definitely not great for other industries, probably less so serviced based. I'm thinking Google Adwords should be effective for most.



How much did you drop on Facebook before you started making money from your ads?


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## CoryJP (Oct 27, 2010)

silverbolt said:


> How much did you drop on Facebook before you started making money from your ads?


How much did we spend before we got a sale from a Facebook referral?


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## silverbolt (Aug 11, 2005)

yes, I just wanted to get an idea


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## CoryJP (Oct 27, 2010)

silverbolt said:


> yes, I just wanted to get an idea


We spent about $30, launch week. 68k impressions, 129 clicks.


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## NexgenGrafix (Feb 11, 2009)

If your thinking Facebook. The best thing to do is to try to figure out when your target market is most likly to be online. You can waste tons of money with Facebook ads. Make sure you do as much research as possable. There was a study about when the most people are online vs when companies should advertise. Ill see if I can find it after work.

Sent from my VS910 4G using T-Shirt Forums


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## dmegret83 (Mar 14, 2012)

agreed, what our your services? are you a print shop or do you manufacture your own brand different business have different marketing plans if your launching your own brands you can easily have your samples made and go around to local boutiques and try to get accounts that way , granted most will probably offer consignment until you have a large enough customer base to drive there competitors to buy your wares if your offering a services your best bet is to go to small charities or schools , find out who else is offering the same services and see if you can go lower in pricing in order to drive business your way even if you cant cut costs sacrifice a little profit, theres more than one way to make a 100 dollars 10 100 sales or 1000 1 dollar sales


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## WCW (May 9, 2012)

printingray said:


> I think You can market without money if you have pretty knowledge about SEO, if you have online business you don't need to invest on PPC just do SEO and rank your targeted keywords in the return you got good traffic as well customers.


+1
Save your money and make a great sight.
Study the science behind getting good ranking.
Don't spam the robots and spread your code into different pages instead of all into one. (a mistake many make)
*10 keywords per page


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## swoopent1969 (Jun 13, 2012)

Incor Design & Promotions

I own a promotional products company and this item is in your customers site every day. Do not go by the price on this above link. Stan


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## inkimprints (Jun 14, 2012)

CoryJP....when you say you got 129 clicks, is that clicks to your site directly or was that 129 clicks to your facebook page and you got 129 "LIKES"? I did some FB ads and I got charged per click, which I thought you paid per "LIKE" I mean you can get 500 clicks and pay 250.00 and out of those 500 you might get 20 "LIKES" doesn't seem like a real good return on investment.

May I ask what your sales conversion was on the 129 clicks? did any actually place a order?


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## MyDeal (May 28, 2012)

You can try posting direct ads on t-shirt blogs. Im personally looking for ads from companies myself.


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## ryan barker (Jul 21, 2011)

that's what i want to know, if FB ads even covers the cost of production let alone make you any money. i don't care if 250 know i exist if i don't get any sales out of it, ya know. 'like'in' ain't buyin'. i mean, these social media sites exist to drive people to your main site, and that's where you get to manipulate them on your own terms to the best of *your* ability. but, there's a leap the customer has to make between your FB page and your site where actual commerce happens. i guess most ppl gives the FB visitor a nudge by offering coupon codes, incentives and such. 

but, i dunno, if i had a brand to hawk i'd hate to have to undercut my own stuff just to appease a casual customer, making it even harder to justify the ads. if you look at if from a purely bean-counter standpoint, say you offered a 10% discount for FB customers using a coupon code. okay, you can live with making 10% less. i mean, that's only two bucks off a twenty dollar shirt. your production costs are, say, $10, leaving you with $10 profit. really, though, you're not out 10% overall. the fact of it is that your production costs haven't changed ~ what you're really doing is taking away 10% of the *total* cost of $20, which is $2, and you have to take that out of your *profit*, leaving you with $8. so, you're not out 10%, what you're really out of is 20% from your profits. 

your 10% off promotion is costing you 20% in profit. the only way to make up that dollar is by lowering your production cost (and even then you're not coming out with round numbers, you'll have decimal points in there, lol). 

considering the cost of FB ads (which i honestly only have a vague understanding of), and the fact that your promotion is costing you twice as much in profits that you didn't realize, exactly how are you supposed to ever make money with these things? by spending more money for more ads in hopes that you can sell more shirts where the math isn't what it seems on the surface? of course, if you're realizing a huge volume of people going to your FB page then to your site, that's one thing, but does that actually happen that often? 

i think that people expect to run an ad campaign once and see instant benefits. it can happen, i suppose, but i would say that on average that's wishful thinking. you have to run ads, then run more ads, then run some more for ppl to actually notice them, right? in this case, i would imagine that you're going to spend a lot of money on FB ads relative to your profits to be effective because that's the nature of advertising ~ it's an upfront cost that you play percentages with, and at some point you need to start making money off of them... you just can't keep pumping money into the system without seeing a return eventually. where is that return going to happen? after saturating FB for two months using all the bells and whistles? immediately? never?


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## Enrique (Apr 27, 2011)

I see people hyping SEO, but SEO gets you TRAFFIC, not SALES. I'm ranking on first page (in many cases #1 overall) for many of my t-shirts but am getting no sales whatsoever online.


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## lupus (Jun 5, 2011)

Enrique said:


> I see people hyping SEO, but SEO gets you TRAFFIC, not SALES. I'm ranking on first page (in many cases #1 overall) for many of my t-shirts but am getting no sales whatsoever online.


Realistically, advertising is not about sales. It is matter of getting your name/brand exposure out there so people are aware of your brand/service/product.

Translation to sales is an entirely different kettle of fish. That depends partly on the advertising campaign you have run, did it touch the right note with the consumer? But also on numerous different factors like price, desirability of product, audience, etc. Even to the point of whether the target audience is the ones controlling the purse strings.

We are currently running an Internet marketing campaign in my day job, starting with a combination of SEO and adwords. Talking to the marketing people, it is quite distressing how little an effect a well optimized site and adwords does. One of the guys indicates figures to the effect that for every time your site shows up in a google search or adword, only about 1.5% will actually visit your site. Of those visitors, only perhaps 5% of them may be motivated to either a sale or translate to a potential lead.

Does this meaner give up on the media? Probably not, as any lead from SEO is better than no lead, but SEO is not the only answer


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## WCW (May 9, 2012)

+1 lupus
Striving more to be unique and stylish.
_"Form and function"_


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## ryan barker (Jul 21, 2011)

i was thinking the same thing, that getting ppl to your site is one thing and selling is another. 

i did one direct mail years and years ago for another product i made, and at that point the return rate was supposed to be in the 3% range if you was lucky, so i can see 1.5%. sometimes folk think that, 'gee, if only 25% of the people that sees this bought my product i'd be doing good!' indeed, you would be doing *great*! lol. when folk find out the return rates on these things, they're probably like i was ~ 'really? that's *it*?' 

then, others might get the idea that SEO is all you need. kinda like where i work, they think just-in-time will macickally make everything okay (stupid american managers simply don't get it ~ they think JIT is the end goal. well, what can you expect from corporate stooges who are nothing more than professional time-wasters and BS artists? lol). but, like anything else, it's going to work better for some things, others not so much. 

i would say, though, that if you come up on the first page, especially at the #1 spot, SEO has worked exactly as advertised. i mean, getting your name at the top of the heap is the point of SEO, after all, eh? from there you're on your own.


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