The interesting thing about advertising is that every business needs it. It is an essential part of any business plan and all successful businesses credit their creative marketing strategy – their ability to reach new customers and network. Advertising, however, can be severely expensive, and sometimes, small businesses or start-ups struggle to begin and maintain quality advertising. The following chart, for example, gives a rough idea of popular advertising medium s and costs:
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Newspaper
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About $1200 for 2” x 2” ad, and easily over 5K for color printing ads in large papers
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Can’t make changes, typically run for a short time, and are too small
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Television
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Easily over 150K for 30 seconds!
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Great exposure – but what start-ups can afford that?
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Radio
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Usually around $100 for a week
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Your customers have to be listening at the time of ad or they’ll miss it
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Online banners
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Vary from a few dollars to several hundred
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Traffic is only generated when the customer wants to click on your business
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Pixel advertising (on Wall Directory.com)
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$10 per year
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Quality leads with actual business interest in your products and services
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Clearly, there is an advertising medium for every budget, but what else can you do to promote your business?
1. Establish a time budget for marketing, advertising, and promotions.
The average person makes the mistake to think that these three words mean the same thing. They do not. Marketing is the general plan your business uses to represent your products, services, and branding qualities. Advertising is essentially any type of ad that you make visible (or audible) to your target audience. Promotions are the variety of offers, raffles, sales, and press releases that your business can generate into the community for exposure. You all three to be successful, and you need to make the time for each. How? Write down the hours you have to dedicate to strategic marketing. What are your goals? Then, assess how promotions and advertising can individually achieve this. Depending on your business, you may have to devote more time to one than the other at varying times of your business model. Diversify. Don’t stick to wasting 10% of your business time on writing newspaper print-ads. Consider online advertising in all its forms: social networking sites, pixel advertising, banners, message boards, and emails.
2. Prioritize the cheap stuff and pick one high-end item.
The odds are that you can’t afford to maintain a television commercial for your business running every night if you just launched an opening. You’d like to though. Be smart and clever by using the advertising that costs the least the most. For example, using the chart above, you could easily devote more money to pixel advertising on a variety of websites and reach more demographics than if you spent your marketing budget on one newspaper ad to run in the Sunday newspaper. Common sense marketing means calling up those local resources, from radio stations to libraries, and understanding where the free community bulletin boards are located in your area. If it means walking up and down your main street with business cards and asking local coffee shops to put up your information, do it. It costs you nothing while you get to network with local business owners and walk off some of that stress!
3. Keep it short, stupid.
Think about your advertising before you go to print. Do you have a logo? Does your catchphrase make sense and have mass appeal to your intended audience? Make your marketing short in content. Why? People charge for space. The more words that you use will determine the space that you need. The last thing that you want to do is try to force a large amount of words into a tiny area. No one will notice your ad and you will have spent your money unwisely. Be creative. Pay for creative people to be on your side, if you don’t have the time. Make your advertising mean something. Make it fit. Make it attractive. Make it catch the eyes.
