If you advertise your business then you must trial your adverts and test to see which ones work the best for you.

By trialling your adverts you should agree on a design and more importantly the content of your advert and run each one for around a month at a time. At the end of each month change the advert to a different design and/or different content and so on. When you are testing your adverts you must make sure you take your marketing calendar data into account too.

At then end of each trial make a note of how many enquiries each advert received and of those enquiries that went on to converted into clients. As you collate this data you will begin to build a picture of which adverts work the best for you and use the ones that produce the most responses.

You should look at advertising as an investment and, as with any investment, you want to get the best return from it. If you divide the cost of an advert by the number of enquiries this will give you the cost per enquiry – for example if an advert cost you £1,000 and you got 100 responses – each response cost you £10; However, if an advert that subsequently cost you £1,000 and produced 200 responses – your return on investment or ROI has been doubled and the cost per enquiry halved.