Does Advertising Your ISP Really Work?

by Rachel Luxemburg [May 18, 1999]

Since this is my first column for ISP-Planet, I thought I'd start off with a challenge: taking on a topic that is far too broad to cover completely in just one column.

Many ISPs dismiss the notion of using traditional advertising methods to promote their company's services. "We tried [radio/TV/newspaper] and it didn't work for us" is a frequently heard response. Others, however, have been thrilled with the results they have gotten. What makes the difference?

There are clear, consistent reasons why these methods don't work for some ISPs. In a nutshell, they all boil down to three problems:

• Insufficient budget
• Bad targeting—wrong demographics, timing, or message
• Bad tracking of results

If you can get these three things right, your chances of a successful advertising program will shoot up dramatically. Let's look at them one by one.

Problem 1: Insufficient Budget
Traditional advertising is expensive, especially TV. When I was starting up my ISP, even placing one ad in a free weekly newspaper would have run me several hundred dollars each week. (This was in high-priced New York City; it would probably be less expensive most other places.) Blowing an entire month's ad budget on running four prime-time TV commercials is not an effective use of your dollars either. Repetition and visibility are the keys.

Some ISPs have had success controlling costs by bartering bandwidth, web hosting, and e-mail for ads, especially with local radio stations. If you can negotiate a similar deal, by all means go for it. If you can't, then look carefully at what's available and what will give you the best bang for your bucks. Just like bandwidth, advertising space costs are a negotiable commodity.

Problem 2: Misguided ad campaign
No matter what the budget, any campaign can be a dud if it's not properly targeted. Know what type of customer you are trying to reach, and then find what will most effectively reach those customers. Every newspaper, magazine, TV and radio station will give you a media kit listing what kinds of people they reach and when. These kits are a tremendously valuable tool. After all, if you want to sell ISDN to business customers, you don't want to put the ad somewhere that targets families at home.

Be aware of differences between regions and even from town to town."I am convinced there is no 'standard' ad method that will work the same in all areas," reports Kevin Ingram of Access Online, Inc. "One place we were in, the local radio station was very popular and the local 'shopper' paper was not, so radio worked well. In others, radio was a total waste of money and print did well. The area we are in currently has an outstanding local free shopper publication that absolutely everyone reads, yet up the road ten miles, another small community has a paper that has proven totally useless."

  Problem 3: Bad Tracking
So you spent the money to get a good number of ads out there and you picked the right vehicles for your target market. How do you know if the ads worked? Unless your ad contained a specific offer and/or your salespeople are very rigorous about asking 'How did you hear about us?' it is difficult to accurately track how many people see or hear any given ad.

It's certainly an achievable goal, however. "We do tracking to see where our leads are coming from, and every employee is trained to ask where a customer came from. Then we run reports every day, week, and month off our accounting program," says Rik Thomas, CTO of EZ Online Inc. in Delaware. "Radio is about 40 percent of our leads. It's our best source."

—End