the Cost of Print Marketing and Advertising

We designed a flyer in house and sent it to our regular advertising agency for review and publication (at a cost of $150), after a couple changes to make things legal they had 2000 copies printed in color on magazine paper (at $0.165/page) and mailed them around the neighborhood. We also paid bulk mail costs for delivery at $0.135 per piece.

The agency also creates ads for print, television, radio, billboards, the internet, etc. And they publish their own and client-created ads by buying air time, newspaper inches, internet impressions, mailing addresses, whatever is needed to get the ads seen.

The advertisers caught a few legal mistakes in their review of our ad, which could have cost us quite a bit of money.

We issue a flyer about once a month (with coupons) to one area or another around our business and the price for the flyers is usually within a few dollars. We're a "once every few months" kind of business for most people, so the approach has worked well for us.

The ads themselves are almost always well-printed, though there have been a few mishaps. One earlier run had a couple hundred ads printed without the blacks, which left only odd looking pictures and blank spaces where there would have been text. Fortunately our business name was still visible or we wouldn't have found out as it took customers coming in for us to realize the problem.

I'm happy the advertising agency reimbursed us for the junk fliers, but disappointed we had to find out about it from our customers. It is, though, a bit of an unreasonable expectation for each and every flier to be checked for correctness individually.

Advertising isn't magic. It won't keep people coming back and buying from you if your products or services are substandard. But no matter how good you are, you can't sell to people if they don't know who you are and what you offer. That's what advertising is for.

Advertisers are a bit goofy. The not so good ones think they can sell anything to anyone. If that were really true, they'd be in sales, not advertising. The really good ones realize that although you never know exactly how well advertising will work,