Know-How Exchange : Strategy

It is highly unlikely that anyone is going to contact your company about laminating and adhesives based on them seeing your ads on the back of a receipt from Taco Bell, KFC, or Pizza Hut.

You are NOT in business to business, you are in the person to person business and the sooner your marketing connects with the needs of those people in the kinds of businesses most likely to use your products, the sooner you'll see an impact from your efforts.

Those ads you're running in newspapers and magazines? WHICH publications are your ads running in and how often? Ideally, you need to be running ads in publications in which other, similar companies or services are advertising, and you need to be looking back at past issues to see how often those same advertisers show up. The greater their frequency, the better for you. Then you need to do some secret shopping to contact those companies to see what their lead generation and lead capture process is like and how they follow up.

Your marketing material needs to focus on the needs of those people in the best position to buy from you. You'd do much better acquiring a list of potential leads and using direct mail. From this point of view, ads in cabs or on airlines are a waste of time and money.

Who exactly is your primary target audience? Where? How do they make purchase decisions? What's important to them?

It's usually not very effective for B2B companies to advertise using B2C media vehicles. You are paying to reach a mass audience when your real target is a very narrow niche.

Being you are B2B, advertising in a consumer media (such as most general newspapers, back of sales receipts, etc.) is not targeting. The vast majority of people who may see the ad are not people you want to reach.

You want to advertise in places where a high percentage of your potential customers are. Advertising in the same places where your competitors advertise is a good sign that those media are good targets.

You say you are B2B and manufacture " laminating adhesives". You want to directly target the people who buy the adhesives you make (ir if you sell a service of making packaging with the adhesives, the product or service you specifically sell). You want to spend the ad dollars in a way that gets you in front of these people for the least cost. A trade magazine for the packaging industry is likely the way to go.