Finding ways for small business advertising is crucial to the growth and survival of the business. It is an investment that will allow the growth of the customer base as it will keep the business brand in the forefront of the customers’ mind. Following are 5 advertising tips.
1. Maintain Communication with Customers
Since maintaining you current customers is more affordable than acquiring new customers, every effort should be made to keep the communication going through social networking, email marketing, newsletters, and coupons.
Social networking is also making a huge impact on the bottom line of most businesses today. The business has to identify if its target market frequents the social media platforms, and if so which ones.
Having identified the platforms, the business will then join those sites in order to engage its prospective customers in conversation and provide them with valuable and useful information regarding its chosen niche products and services. Facebook is perhaps the biggest of these sites, and half of its 600 million users access their accounts daily. This is a huge customer base for a business to engage with on a daily basis.
2. Outsource Marketing Tasks
Outsource any marketing tasks that do not want to do or are unwilling to complete. Whether it is SEO, or copywriting, hire a professional to do the job. This will free up your time to focus on business activities and provide good service to your customers.
3. Create a Website and Develop an Online Presence
Many small business owners are not convinced they need a website for their business. Although current customers will visit the brick and mortar store, prospective clients are more likely to find your website as they research the Internet for the product they seek.
Maintain a website and optimize with SEO techniques using outsourced services if you cannot do it yourself. This improves the site’s ranking in the search engines, and generates massive traffic back to your website – a completely new source of customers.
One of the emerging trends these days is providing mobile users with a website that is fully optimized for their use. It has been found that a great deal of local searches is performed by mobile users, while they are on the go, commuting to work, travelling on planes and in trains, and this fact provides businesses with a great opportunity to capture this market.
These users are performing searches on their mobile devices and a local business will do very well to ensure that they are found by this lucrative market. But yet many businesses, at this time, have still not optimized their websites for mobile devices.
4. Networking
This marketing tool works well with small businesses. It provides new contacts and allows new ways of interacting with current customers. Join the Chamber of Commerce and open new opportunities for networking and meeting other business owners.
5. Public Relations
This is another good and free way to advertise your business. It can be done cheaply by just creating a clothing of even a food drive on your website, and then advertising the event through a press release in online channels and in the local newspapers.
The press release should give the details of the charity event. A press release can have a powerful impact on how the business is viewed by its customers and prospective customers, and its effect could be quite long lasting.
The event could be added to the news section of your website and will be well regarded by the search engines which rates new website content very highly. It will also add to your SEO marketing.
The whole aim of advertising is to generate interest in the business’ product or service, and not to do any actual selling. As a result of its advertising, the targeted customers will be enticed to get more information on the company’s products and services.
It should also be remembered that in the process of advertising, how successful the campaign is will depend on the message that is being conveyed to the target market. At all times the message should be conveyed in a very precise, open, clear and honest way that will leave no doubt in the minds of the target customers the ideas that are being communicated.
These are 5 quick tips on small business advertising that can be made part of your marketing plan. However it should be borne in mind that the way a business markets to its customers will vary with the business’ goals, its budget and its targeted customers.
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