Hey Steve,

As we come closer and closer to the Grand Opening of Zay Zay’s Hot Dog Cart, I got an important question. Advertising.

We had talked about selling my bike and using the money towards a full page ad in the Sunday paper. While we realize that the money invested will not turn over a profit right away, the ad would put Zay Zay’s in alot of peoples eyes and in the long run help spread the word that there’s a Hot Dogger in town.

On the other hand, we do have other places the money could be used within Zay Zay’s; product, signs, uniforms, business cards, flyers ect. Thought maybe you and/or some slingers could help us out, maybe use the topic in a newsletter???

Thanks again for all you do and for helping us SO much.

Scooby of Zay Zay’s

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Hey Scoob,

You’re welcome! It’s always fun to watch a new business being born. You are doing a great job on your E-Z Built Hot Dog Cart and I can’t wait to see pics of it when it’s finished. On to your question…

I’m not a big fan of newspaper advertising for many reasons.

First, it’s expensive. When I started King Weenie Hot Dogs we ran an ad in the local paper once a month and to be honest we didn’t see any increase in sales on the weeks which the ad ran.

Second, it’s hard to know if the ad is effective or not. You design what you hope is a catchy ad, pay the paper to run it, then wait to see if your sales go up. But even if sales increase that week, how do you know it was a result of the newspaper ad? Perhaps you had great weather that week or something else happened which influenced your hot dog sales.

One way to see how many of your sales was a result of the ad is to use a coupon in the ad. That way you can track the effectiveness by the number of coupons you receive. We did this at King Weenie and found that we got about four coupons each time we ran the ad. However, this is not conclusive either. How many people saw the ad, did not cut out the coupon, but came to the cart anyway because they saw us in the paper? Hard to tell.

Opportunity Costs. Whenever you spend money in your business your incur what’s known as “opportunity costs”. This is just a fancy schmancy way of saying that if you spend money on one thing, you can’t spend it on something else. So if you spend money on an ad, it costs you the opportunity to spend it on flyers, or uniforms, or other things that might also help the business. You need to weigh the opportunity cost of every dollar you spend.

I would rather spend the money on branding rather than newspaper advertising. Like you said Scooby, uniforms, professional graphics and signage, flyers, business cards are all things your company will need. And unlike advertising, many of these items are not perishable. A newspaper ad ceases to be effective within two to three days after the ad runs.

People don’t save newspapers. But they do save flyers and business cards, and they  pass them around. Of course uniforms and professional signage last a long time, maximizing the time-effectiveness of the money invested.

Here is a better alternative to buying ad space in a newspaper. Contact the editor and tell him about your new business. Odds are he or she would love to run a story on you.

This is what I did when I opened my first hot dog cart and it worked great. It get’s your name out there, introduces you to the community, and it doesn’t cost you a penny. Plus, you get a lot more space than the standard size display ad.

You all know my feelings about internet advertising. That’s where the winners go. The internet is not the future anymore – it’s the present. Facebook is good, but you really need your own website with the ability to build an email list of customers and market to that list.

When you have a list of customer emails you can let them know whenever you have a special, a contest, a new product, etc. Unlike Facebook, everyone has email and they check it multiple times a day. It’s far and away the best method to communicate with your customers, build a relationship with them, and get them to come to your cart whenever you want them to.

If you don’t have a website yet, or you don’t know how to collect and market to your customers using email lists, my team can build you a site that does that on autopilot. You don’t need to know a thing about computers because our websites automatically do the hard part for you. All you have do is type up a message about your special and click a button. Out it goes to everyone on your list so they know to come to your cart the next day for lunch. Easy peasy.

And we can build you a website like this for free because we are subsidized by a sponsor who pays us instead of you having to. Once your site is built, we’ll also teach you how to use it most effectively with our tutorial video hot dog marketing lessons.

Let me know if you want one. Call me at 636-399-2460 and I’ll answer all your questions personally. If I’m on the line with someone else leave a message and I’ll call you back.

-Steve

P.S. If you have any marketing tricks other than websites or Facebook, let us know in the comments!

Click here for free hot dog cart lessons by email.