Key 7 — They never knew you existed: When paid ads are finally worth it

It is genuine. Some businesses really are invisible: Around two-thirds of UK trade businesses have no website of their own,¹ and a firm that cannot be found cannot be hired. At some point, when everything else is working, buying attention is the correct next move and the only remaining lever.

The mistake is not advertising. The mistake is the order. Almost every owner who has been disappointed by advertising bought it while the leaks were open, watched the money produce nothing, and concluded that advertising does not work for his trade. What actually happened is that he paid to create demand and then failed to collect it — 70% of UK consumers say they are likely to choose whichever business responds first,² so the firm that answers wins the customer the advertiser paid for.

Put it plainly. Suppose a firm spends £250 a month while thirteen calls a week go unanswered. Every pound is spent to make the phone ring in a business that has already demonstrated, thirteen times a week, that it does not answer the phone. The spend is not wasted because the advertising is bad, but because it was pointed at a bucket with a hole in it — and the hole is free to fix.

Keys 1 to 6, in the simplest form. Ask them as questions with numbers for answers, not opinions:

• Does the site load quickly on mobile data, and does it ask for something a customer would actually want to do?
• Are there recent reviews, and does somebody reply to them?
• Is the count of calls nobody answered and nobody returned zero at the end of the month?
• Does every enquiry get an acknowledgement within minutes that says what happens next and by when?
• Do past customers hear from the business once a year?
• Do you know your quote win rate, and does the quote say what is included, how long it takes and when it could start?

Six yeses and advertising is an investment. One no and it is a subsidy for whoever answers their phone.

Brookfield Plumbing & Heating Ltd of Northwich is illustrative: The firm does not exist and the figures are constructed to reconcile. It spends nothing on advertising, and plenty of well-meaning advice would tell it to start. It also has thirteen calls a week going to voicemail, 184 web enquiries a year answered an average of nine hours later, 2,900 past customers never contacted, and 43 unexplained lost quotes.

If Brookfield spent £250 a month, that would be £3,000 a year sent into that arrangement. Not one pound of it changes any of those four numbers. It only increases the volume flowing through them, so most of what it buys is lost at exactly the points it was already being lost — and the owner ends the year poorer, with the settled belief that advertising does not work for plumbers.

Turn it round. The same £3,000 spent after the six Keys hold arrives at a business where calls are answered, enquiries are acknowledged in minutes, reviews are recent, past customers are in touch and quotes explain themselves. The advertising has not changed. Everything it lands on has.

Advertising is bought last, deliberately, and with the business’s own arithmetic in hand — because by now the owner knows how many enquiries he gets, what proportion become quotes, what proportion of quotes become jobs and what a job is worth. That chain tells him whether an enquiry is worth paying for, and how much. Nobody who skipped Keys 1 to 6 has those numbers, which is why most trades advertising is bought on hope.

It is also scheduled honestly. Advertising should run when the business can answer, and demand is not evenly spread: 26% of UK consumers say evenings between five and nine would best meet their needs, rising to 32% in households with children³ — precisely when a working homeowner sits down and deals with the boiler. Weighting spend towards that window only makes sense if somebody is reachable then; if nobody is, the honest choice is to fix the answering or move the schedule. Results are then measured in jobs won and money made rather than impressions, because the only question worth asking of a pound spent is what it brought back.

Do not buy advertising. Take the six questions above and answer them honestly, with figures, for your own business. Whichever one you cannot answer is your real next job, and it is almost certainly cheaper than a month of advertising. Answer all six with numbers and you are ready — and you are also the rare firm that will know whether the advertising worked.

Knight Li Group, a UK consultancy for trades and small businesses, runs all seven checks on a real business and shows the arithmetic on its own figures, in sequence, so an owner can see which Key is costing him most before he spends anything. It is free and carries no obligation.