15th Sep 2010
Business Slogans-Cheap Testing With Adwords
As a small business owner you recognize the importance of distilling the leading edge of your marketing campaigns and other small business promotion efforts down to a really memorable, special phrase. Business slogans receive prime placement on all of your marketing materials, such as signage, print advertising, giveaway items such as T-shirts and hats, and all of your online marketing efforts as well. As much money and time as ads cost you it is critical that you choose a phrase worthy of your company: you need a spectacular business tagline, as it does a disproportionate amount of work in establishing a brand for your small business advertising.
I want to share a secret for determining with specificity just how effective different company slogans might be in grabbing attention of people who are focused on something else when they read it. A slogan’s function is new customer acquisition after all, which is a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to convert people with no knowledge of your business or products you sell, into customers, or at least establish a foothold for your business in their minds. Discovering how catchy a slogan really is through testing is a way to avoid wasting time and effort on small business advertising ideas that don’t work.
A Google Adwords campaign can be run for very little money, as little as $25 if you are very cost-conscious, and it is an excellent way to gauge response to any phrase very quickly. When you have four or five slogan ideas that you would like to test, you simply sign up for Adwords and in just a day or two you’ll have hard data on what percentage of people who were served each ad clicked on it. Your two-line text ads appear on contextually-relevant pages as determined by Google in the sidebar of sites whose owners have Adsense installed, and Google sites such as Gmail and YouTube. If someone clicks on one of your ads you can take them to your company’s website, but you are less interested in driving traffic in this case than you are the statistics regarding your ad conversion rate, with which Google will supply you.
Having done this myself I can tell you that the results are often surprising. An ad that I thought might be clicked on 10% of the time might actually only convert 1% of the time or even less. The point is that you can quickly eliminate from consideration slogans featuring text ads that get very little response; that attention-grabbing capability is exactly what you are testing here.
When you use this method to test how catchy a business slogan is you only pay when someone clicks on an ad, so you can be assured that when your initial $25 advertising budget is depleted you will have actionable data. You will probably eliminate a few slogans and then refine the phrases that appear to be promising based on your initial testing.
When you consider the cost of this method relative to simply guessing how effective business slogans might be, you can see how far $100 could go in narrowing down your choices so that you end up with a slogan in which you can have confidence. Your small business marketing strategy will rely so heavily on your slogan that testing like this is a small price to pay to ensure that your slogan converts.
Leave a Reply