One of the first questions that comes up when searching for a print ad designer is how much does my print ad design cost? Print ad pricing is an important part of the decision process when searching for a freelancer or ad design agency. But not the only thing.
With print advertising as other advertising media, you already have a built in cost — and that is the cost of buying your ad space. Add in the cost of your production and you have the total cost of your insertion. Of course you could also add in the cost of your time or an employee’s time to organize your marketing effort. So let’s do a simple calculation on a hypothetical print ad.
Let’s say you are going to run a 1/4 page in a community newspaper. For the sake of argument, we will be running the same ad 3 times. Each insertion is $750.00, so the total cost of running the print ad will be $2250.00. The cost of you design the ad is $395.00 (which is what we would normally charge), and it took you 3 hours coordinate the ad design and work with your paper’s ad sales representative (at $50/hr)
Print Ad Media Costs = $2250.00
Print Ad Design Costs = $395.00
Administrative Costs = $150.00
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TOTAL COST = $2795.00
So your ad costs $2795, right? Well, not really. The reason you’re advertising is to make a sale, correct? So we need to factor how much business this ad will attract, and then factor that into our costs. Let’s say you will get 10 leads per insertion, so a total of 30 leads. Of your 30 leads you have a conversion rate of 20%. Each sale is worth $500 with a lifetime customer value of $2000. [Read more…]
