When you’re in business, you will need to advertise. How much you do and how you do it will depend on your budget and on your sector, but no matter what, a marketing campaign needs to be at the forethought of your mind at all times. Without advertising, no one is going to know who you are, and that means that even if you have the most wonderful product in the world, it won’t sell because no one knows about it. Take a look at our list of how to advertise your business, and find out how to get started.
Know Your Audience
Before you even start selling your product, you need to know your target audience. If you don’t, you might be wasting your marketing dollars trying to persuade people who just don’t need what you are selling to buy it. Your marketing campaign must be more focused and targeted, which means carrying out market research before you begin. Doing so will help you to understand not only who you should be marketing your product to, but also how to do it. For example, is your target audience more likely to spend time on social media, or listening to the radio? Are they the kinds of people who want to invest in high beta stocks or do they prefer to save their money in a bank account? When you know, you can make your marketing budget stretch much further.
Track & Measure
Many small businesses don’t know if their advertising is working or not because they don’t track and measure it. If you want to ensure that you are spending money in the right places and that your advertising is doing the job it is meant to do; you will need to look into measuring and tracking it. It is easy to do on advertising platforms such as Facebook or Google AdWords because the information is collated for you. However, it is also important to ask every person who comes to your door, or who phones in, how they heard of you. This will give you a good indication of which marketing campaign is working the best, and which is doing nothing at all. You can then focus on the successful one and spend more money on it.
Get Your Timing Right
Although it may seem at first to make sense to continually advertise all year round, spending your budget equally each month, that isn’t actually the best way to go. It can make your advertising campaign blur into the background, especially if it remains the same all year round. It might be worth reconsidering and advertising only at specific times of the year. That way you can launch a new advertising campaign in a big way, spending more money on it and making sure people notice it.
Get Your Brand Right
When you advertise, you will want people to remember not just the ad itself, but your company name and what you do in general as well. It’s one thing to create a campaign that has a catchy jingle or a fun storyline, but if your business is forgotten, you won’t get many sales. Therefore you need to have a good brand before you get started, and that brand needs to be focused on during your advertising so that people can remember you.
