How to Save Money on Advertising

How to Save Money On Advertising

Get practical and actionable tips on how to save money on advertising creation, production, media and follow-up from the Editors and the MarketingZone community.

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Costs for Advertising

Your budget for advertising will need to cover:

Media costs: This should be 80% or more of your total ad budget.
- These are the costs to place or run your ads. The ad industry calls this ad space, media space or media.
Ad concept creation and production costs: This should be 20% or less of your total advertising budget.
- These are the costs for the idea or concept to be created and then for the ad to be produced. These costs vary considerably depending on what type of advertising you are creating. Costs and ways to save money creating and producing ads are covered in the specific articles for each type of advertising. From the Advertising section of MarketingZone, choose the type of advertising you want to create (online, movie theater, search, TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, etc.). There are specific articles for each type of advertising about how to create the ads, with tips on how to save money.
- Ad testing is also funded out of this 20%. Major advertisers spend 3-5% of their total ad budget on ad testing to ensure the ads they invest millions of media dollars on are as effective as possible. There are some cost-effective ways you can use as a small business or non-profit organization to ensure your ads will be effective.

Costs to support the "call to action" of your campaign
- These include a wide variety of activities such as a web landing page or a 1-800 number for people to respond to your call to action, coupon fulfillment cost if your ad offers a coupon promotion, or prizes if you campaign includes a contest or sweepstakes.

From our experience: Clients want to spend money on media (getting the message out). = Agencies need to be paid (and make a profit) and their creative teams want to ensure their creative ideas are produced so that they look as good as possible. And then there's the decision about whether to spend money (and time) on ad testing. There's a natural tension that you as a client needs to manage. It's your money. But it's also your brand reputation, and a poorly produced or "homemade"-looking ad may hurt your brand reputation. So your challenge is how to produce the best possible ad for the lowest possible cost. Here are some tips to help you with that.

Ways to save money buying media

Know this: These are general tips. Each of the articles on how to buy media for each type of Advertising (TV, radio, newspaper, online, etc.) have very specific tips for how to save money buying media.

Hire a media planner if you are making a significant media buy
- Everything in media is negotiated and it's a lot of an "insider's game" where the professional media buyers know what they've paid in the past, have access to expensive third-party research and tools, know what to ask for and are experts at negotiating.
- Top Media Planning and Buying Suppliers

Be open-minded about media vehicles
- If you are set on advertising on certain shows, in certain publications and at certain times, you will pay the highest prices. Just like if you were buying a house and told your agent that you would only live on certain streets instead of giving them an objective of finding you the best three-bedroom, two-bathroom house at the best price.
- Advertising Media Buying
Negotiate
- Have your media experts shop around for you.
- Or if you're doing this yourself, power up your negotiation skills. This will help you get high-quality media placements at a decent price. Harvard Business Review wrote an excellent article on "Extreme Negotiations" about how experts in the military negotiate. Buying media isn't like negotiating world peace, but the article is filled with all kinds of practical specific ideas of what to avoid doing and what to do and say instead at each of the five stages of a negotiation. Get a copy at the Library for free or get a PDF of the article for under $7 at HBR.com
Consider media placements cancelled by other advertisers
- These usually come at the last minute, and can be a good bargain to pick up. Just make sure you already have an ad ready to go, and that these media placements truly meet your needs. Like impulse purchases at the department store, you want to avoid buying just because it's cheap if it isn't really what you wanted.
- You'll need to let media reps know ahead of time that you've reserved a portion of your budget for these type of deals so they know to call you when they have space.
Optimize your website and individual web pages to attract website visitors for free
- This is called SEO (search engine optimization).
Consider Paid Search as an alternative to online banner advertising, especially if you're doing a direct response campaign. Search can be much more cost effective and drive a higher response rate for you.
- Typical Advertising Response Rates covers the typical results for ads on search, online ads, Facebook ads and other types of advertising.
- Search Advertising
Consider buying remnant ad space
- While these media placements are considered low-impact and less attractive by many advertisers, they are inexpensive and can be a good fit for a low-margin, high-volume business.
- Shop wisely. You don't want to put your brand on inappropriate media.

Ways to save money creating and producing ads

Know this: These are general tips. Each of the articles on how to buy create ads for each type of Advertising (TV, radio, newspaper, online, etc.) have very specific tips for how to save money creating and producing the ads.

Get the ad created for free or at a very low cost by the media vendor’s internal creative department
- Talk to the ad sales rep to see if they’ll create and produce an ad for you if you agree to buy ads. They'll only talk to you about this if you aren't working with an agency or freelancer. They don't want to take business away from agencies.

Caution: Ask to see other ads they’ve created. Is the quality professional enough for your brand?

Hire an experienced freelance graphic designer to create your ad
- Ask to see other ads they’ve created. Make sure the freelancer you plan to hire created the ad themselves and wasn’t “on a team” who worked on it.
- Find a Freelancer on MarketingZone
- How to Select and Hire a Graphic Designer

Try user-created ads
- You can manage the process yourself or work with a media partner to post your advertising assignment on a website, host a contest where anyone can participate and produce an ad based on your creative requirement specifications. This can work quite well if you want to make video ads. While this is much less expensive than having an agency develop the ads for you, beware that you will have to deal with usage rights issues and contest rules and regulations. These are not trivial tasks, so check things out carefully before going down this path.

Know this: Pay particular attention to adhering to FTC (Federal Trade Commission) laws regarding claims and comparisons to competitors. If the FTC receives a complaint they can and will require the advertiser to pull the ad in question until the issue is resolved. You are guilty until proven innocent. For small businesses that may only have one ad to run, this could mean you have to pay for media space you’ve reserved and don’t have an ad to run. The FTC website does an excellent job explaining the laws.

What do you have to say? Share your comments below or give advice on how to save money creating advertising.

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