Have you tried this with Google Adwords?

I've played around with Google Adwords with several of my clients, with mixed results.

Adwords are a great tool if enough people are looking for what you have to sell. But when you're selling something people might NOT be searching for, you have to think a bit more creatively about how to get their attention and hopefully entice them to visit your site.

One thing as marketers we DO know is that the web is used early on in a buying cycle. Consumer and Business buyers use it to research the category they're interested, often a while in advance of actual intent to purchase.

So you might get them browsing, but getting them to visit your site and BUY is the trickiest part.

So I thought I'd trial a bit of "old school" DM using this "new school" medium and ran the voucher ad below recently...

I linked it to a landing page that explained the offer - and included a promotional code to enter if they chose to join the service. My rationale was, if people were "tyre kicking" already, this might get them over the line.

In the first four weeks of running this little advert, SIX people joined the service using this promotional code.

At a cost of around about 60 cents per sign up [not including time for my creative brilliance of course :) ].

Now to understand whether six is a lot, you need to think about what each customer is worth.

For this service based business every customer means in the vicinity of $600 a year.

At 60 cents to attract, this makes a whopping ROI on this advertisment 1000%

If only all our marketing gave such a great return!

Now, I don't have the goose that laid the golden egg just yet. I'll have that when I can get 100 customers to buy using this offer.

But I'm off to a great (zero budget) start.

Why don't you try it for your business and let me know how you go!