Wasting $10,000 on Print Advertising

In Erik’s career, there has been a couple of times when he’s put good money into newspaper advertising and it yielded nothing. The first time was when he was helping his wife with her cake bakery. They would offer coupons and he would see those coupons coming back so it seemed that people were actually reading it.

Then he decided to spend $250 for an ad in the Sunday newspaper and NO ONE brought the ad in to redeem their free cupcake. It was a complete waste of money.

Erik then did it again with his software business 80/20 and ran color ads that were about $800 each for about a year, spending about $10,000 in total. He had one person say to him that he saw his ad but that was the extent of his ROI on running newspaper ads.

He did learn that newspaper advertising doesn’t lead to much more than brand awareness.