In many companies, a large proportion of ad budget is wasted and it is important for business owners to know how advertising dollars are often misdirected, misspent and squandered. It is a good thing to define areas that are the most wasteful. Advertising money can be poorly spent when businesses don’t use the services of professional advertising agency and consultants. In-house marketing department may lack the expertise to use the available media correctly. Weak creative decisions and poor media planning can cause us to waste money needlessly. We should avoid methods that don’t reach the target market properly. Advertising agencies should be honest and very adept in ensuring that our marketing strategies are properly implemented. In order to improve cooperation, we may use internal marketing employee as a liaison in the advertising agency. Even with the help of a professional advertising agency, it is important that the company has the proper leadership style that encourages creativity and flexibility when approaching the market.

There are different ways we can waste advertising fund. As an example, many companies freely purchase full page, full color ads without making proper research to know whether they are really effective. It’s a good way to ensure that our message is getting through, but there could be lack of view; because we are targeting less relevant target groups. We should be aware that full page ads should be properly researched to ensure that it stays relevant. Another thing that we need to avoid is to have billboards with too many words. This can be a huge money waster and not all readers are willing to read long sentences. Some billboards may even use a whole paragraph and it’s unlikely that anyone will stop just to read our billboards. Another thing to avoid is to use free ads designs in newspapers. They can be very generic and used by dozens of other ads inside the newspapers. If we purchase an ads, we should make sure that we use motivating and eye-catching designs. With generic designs, our ads could lack the impact.

Bad logos are another thing that we need to avoid whenever possible. Logo is key when it comes to proper branding. Nothing irks people more than seeing confusing logo. If we plan to move our business forward, we should invest in proper logo designs. We should consider consumer’s perspectives if we want to build trust. Shoddy design will result in poor brand awareness. In-direct mail is another way to lose our advertising money. People could receive dozens of envelopes with brochures and other advertising tools that they automatically end up in trash. This is a quick way to throw our money down the drain. If local consumers have been saturated and are non-responsive to in-direct mail, then we should consider whether it’s appropriate to do that. In this situation, we should know how to properly target our market. In any advertising attempt, we should make sure that we are able to do effective brand building  We should avoid over-buying during any advertising campaign to make sure that we don’t waste our advertising dollars.