Foreign Perspectives

When we started off the original plan was to get going on the Internet marketing first as that would be a quick success (hopefully!) then we’d move onto advertising in the books & magazines. Notably absent was the idea of advertising by way of brochures and it was quite a deliberate omission too. Why?

Simple really: by and large you get roughly a 1% return on any marketing that you do. So if you want to get ONE sale you need to distribute ONE HUNDRED brochures. Unless your brochures are very cheap or your service is very expensive it’s easy to see that brochures are not the way to go. For example, say your brochure costs about £1/$1/‚€1 including any postage or distribution costs then that 1% rule means that you will be spending around £100/$100/‚€100 to get one sale which isn’t really a runner unless your product costs at least 10 times that.

This is, of course, why the Internet is so appealing. You can get thousands of people reading your “brochure” and at virtually no cost to yourself. Sadly, that 1% rule doesn’t apply to all the hits that your website will receive but it should apply to those that are relevant (which can be determined by looking through your site visitor stats). However, if you can manage to, say, double your site traffic then, by and large, the number of relevant readers will also double so, in principle, you should double your sales, or at least those that you get directly from your own website.