I have been in business for many years, Return on Investment is what I consider a valuable metric. MY ROI from social media has led me to deleting most of my social presence, The effort involved does not get the same results as I do elsewhere.

I do kitchens, BICs and custom furniture to the consumer market. Likes and Exposure don’t pay the rent, leads and sales do. Likes on facebook and Pinterest are great, they make you feel validated but they don’t put grub on the stove.

Advertising companies are cnuts, they will tell you that advertising in our magazine is good, but for them not you. If you advertise and get no results, try something else, My rule is that if an advert does not make a profit, I try something else. I am not throwing money out and getting nothing back, that’s just stupid.

What works for me, you may ask?

SEO is my main source of business. My website is continuously being tweaked and changed, I am in the middle of a complete redesign right now, Web designers will proclaim that it’s not good enough, I have had a dozen offer to design me a site in exchange for shares, for a small fee etc, but I am happy with the basics, they get results.

In times of slowdowns, flyers work like a dream. I have a theory that there are three types of people that hand out flyers, Those that pick the main routes and hand out a gazillion because traffic, but like the web traffic that is just passing through has no value. They always say flyers don’t work.

Then theirs the ones that go from door to door handing them out, better than the scattergun approach above, but time consuming, Also pick the wrong fellas to hand out flyers and you can have 5000 in a 1000 post boxes toot suite. Results can be good, but you are limited in the quantity you can distribute in a few hours.

Here is the secret to my success with flyers, pick a local school, pick an intersection leaving said school, hand out the flyers in the hour before school. The fact is that school drop offs are done by people that live in the area. I have better results at high schools in the more affluent areas, my target market seems to send their kids to these schools,

I am in two minds about Google Ads, They used to be cheap, they used to work but my results are very iffy these days.

Facebook ads don’t work, the targeting is very iffy in my part of the world. I get visits from people 500 miles away, I get many visits from students even if I exclude them and I get more requests for a job than anything else./ I don’t know where you are it may be different there.

The question you need to ask yourself is, Is my target market hanging out on Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest / TikTok all day? If so how the hell are they making money to afford my service?