Related to sales: what is your advertising budget?

How much, as a percentage of your revenue, do you spend on advertising? Do you feel that your advertising is effective? What are you doing to advertise your business?

I guess I'm trying to get a good idea of how much I probably SHOULD be spending on advertising. I don't feel happy with the returns on my current ad. I wonder if its position is just too low on the first page, since it had recently gotten knocked off by more expensive ads. And now that I paid a little more, I feel that it's not quite THERE in its returns. It used to deliver a lot more visits per day, but it's just off.

I branched out a bit and decided to advertise in Prim Perfect magazine. I got a positive bounce when that issue came out, so I think it's been effective and I am happy with it. But I'm wondering what else I can do. Where do you advertise and what places have been effective?

Inworld advertising at the moment I'm finding to be a complete pile of pants. I'm getting more hits from club adverts for L$125-L$250 a week than I am from classifieds.

If I stop renting at a mall I throw that money into advertising to see if it makes a difference and the results have generally been negative.

Magazines, classified here, maybe SL Universe or NCI, I see them as far better value for money than the inworld classified system.

I remember reading somewhere before that spending more than 50L a week on classifieds was basically a waste of Lindens...I used to throw up an add (not every week) for $500L but now I do it for $50. It's enough to find me in search, and that's all that is really worth.

I also think it might soon be time to start looking at some of the magazines.

My store is rather new and I'm still experimenting, so it's too early for me to reach many conclusions. I advertised in the previous issue of Prim Perfect and, like you, got good results immediately after the issue came out. (I don't sell furniture or homes, which are Prim Perfect's areas of focus, but I think the readership is ideal for my store.)

It is now Zero. I'm booked solid for my sim-building work and my texture work, many months in advance, all based on word-of mouth and referrals from satisfied clients. So I have no ads at all, any more.

When I was still selling clothes and stuff, I was only budgeting L$50 to L$100 per week per store location. Enough for a single classified ad per store. Honestly, I rarely saw any impact from it, that I could trace to having been better because I had the ads.

I think my total is 253L for a classified which really I doubt makes much difference. I only have a main store these days and don't advertise anywhere else.

zero

I spend min or close to it for classified ads for my store and that is it. I can do more for free with marketing techniques that are way more effective. For my rentals i do take out an ad here and there, set up a booth at some event etc...but those are few and far between for the low response rate. Most people find me in all search.

I run 3 separate ads in classifieds for my store. The first is a general one for the store as a whole but that highlights my quad cat avatars. I pay L$100pw for that one, and in the last month or so (since the most recent version of it went up) it has garnered 128 tps, 5 map refs (landmarks, is that?) and 4 profile picks. My second ad is for my dolphin avatars and I also pay L$100 pw for it. In the last month or so it has gotten 123 teleports, 10 map and 5 profile picks. And my third (and most recent) ad features my dragonet avatars, which I pay L$50 for. This has gotten 44 teleports, 5 map and 0 profile picks so far.

So there's some specific stats for you. In my case, I think it helps a lot that my stuff is very much niche - there aren't many folk making quad cat or dolphin avs. There are more making dragons, which is probably part of the reason why that ad returns fewer responses. Be that as it may, my store makes a very nice profit, so clearly my advertising is working well for me without costing me a fortune. If you want some general advice from my experiences with classified ads, I'd suggest that it's probably worth your while trying to find some specific "niche" features of your product to focus the ads on if you can, so that if someone searches for those features they'll only get a few results and yours will be among them. I don't know how feasible that is for clothing-type businesses (edit: I misrecalled who the OP was - it may be more feasible for a house-building business if there's some specific feature or style you focus on that is unusual), but it seems to be what makes my ads findable given my small advertising budget.

And if you want bang for your advertising buck, you can't beat a post to the classified sections of these forums! That's free, and I've gotten quite a few customers from those myself. If you do post ads for your product there, I recommend making sure that you include (a) a pic of the product, even if you have to link to an offsite image to get it to show, and (b) an SLurl to your store.

Good luck!

50L per week on a classified and 30L per week on a land search thingy! neither appear to be working so far but i'll give it a little more time

For property rentals, I noticed that the prices have gone up significantly, to the point where you have to pay over 2k to stay on the first page. This cost has effectively doubled in the last couple of months. I used to pay 1603, but realized a couple of weeks ago that that was no longer sufficient to stay on the front page of classifieds. Looking at them now, I see that the most expensive ads have pretty much doubled in price. I am getting more clicks from new search and rental directories than the classified.

I wonder if it would be more effective if I paid more, or if something is wrong with my ad. I hate throwing away thousands of lindens but if it works, it's not throwing it away, is it?

I second that.

Well it's not throwing it away if it attracts custom, how do you measure advertising to custom in a market like property rental? There are several ways people can find a property, I found your stuff because a tenant of mine bought your buildings, so I used your picks to find your store.

It really depends upon your market, fashion is saturated and as such you're really going to struggle to get value for all but the top adverts. As someone else in this thread stated, in a niche market prices aren't so competitive.

Property rentals if the advert price is doubling, is doubling your advert going to pay for the advert through sales?

I'm currently spending about L$214-ish a month on a classified advert (L$50 a week), about L$642 a month (L$150 a week) on a 50-prim space in a mall, and about L$128 a month (L$30 a week) on a search listing.

I find that this is effective enough for my needs, as all I really need are a handful of people to try my products and then that grows quickly with word-of-mouth. It likely depends on your product; is it something people will see someone wearing/using and say to themselves "Hey I want one too!" or is it one that people are likely to talk to their friends about? Is it something that is likely to appear in clubs and other places where people will see it and wonder where they can get their own?

As with any question regarding sales and running a business in SL, the answer is; it depends. It depends on your product/service, it depends on how people use it, it depends how unique (easy to market) it is. My findings however are that no amount of spending on advertising compares to a good following by word-of-mouth, but again not every product may be suited to this, and it's taken me a while to get my earnings where they are.

Well I have a bit more vacancy than I would like at this moment. If it was full, yes, it would pay for the advertisement and then some, and as I have plans to expand, it would help there, too, once that comes online. I also have a throwaway 50L ad that gets some hits. Right now they are both performing about the same, although the more expensive ad usually brought a lot more visits.

In real life it should be about 6-8% of your net I think. No clue how that works in here. I have heard the L$50 ads get you just as far as the more expensive ones do. Don't know for sure if it still works or not it used to, if you put a lot of spaces before your description it would put you high in line in "all".