Advertising

Via paid channels, advertising is a marketing strategy that enables you to communicate with potential clients about your goods or services. The purpose of advertising for a small business may be to increase brand recognition, enhance your reputation, increase interaction, produce leads or turn prospective leads into customers.

How To Use Small Business Advertising

An extensive marketing plan includes more than just advertising. Four Cs makes up the marketing mix: clients/customers, cost, convenience and communication. Together with owned media like a company website and earned media like public reactions, advertising is the paid media component of the communication piece.

Goals Of Advertising

Advertising has three main purpose:

To Inform: Informative advertising helps building awareness about your brands, products or service.

To Persuades: Persuasive advertising tries to convince its audience that a company's offerings are the best for their needs. It's goal is to influence consumers or businesses to switch brands, try a new service or stay loyal to the brand.

To remind: Reminder ads prompt people to remember their need for a product or service or how it can benefit them if they buy more soon.

Target Market

Establishing your target market is the critical first step in any advertising campaign. You need to know who your intended audience is before you can reach them. If your target audience is senior citizens, for example, an advertising medium such as Snapchat is a poor choice. Similarly, milennals are much less likely to read newspapers.

Defining the target market involves building a demographic profile of the prospective customers by taking into account criteria such as age, gender, materials status, lifestyles, shopping habits etc.

It is also important to check out what competitors are doing in their ads to see if there is a target market they're ignoring that may be a good market for you to target.

Common Advertising Methods

There are many different types of advertising that are typically used by small business.

Online Advertising

Online advertising includes a myriad of advertising opportunities such as

• Search Engine Advertising: Advertising with search engine such as Google or Bing allows you to serve your message to a very targeted audience that is looking for information related to your product or service.
• Pay-per-click Advertising: This a type of ads that runs on one site and drives traffic to to your site. You can get extensive customers data from these ads and you only pay when users click on the link.
• Email Ads: This requires a customer email list and adherence to anti-spam regulations. But for customers who opt in your email can be a powerful way to get keep in your business in their mindset and get the world out about a new product or promotions.
• Social Media: With easy access to user demographic data you can finely tailor ads to the audience. Creating a Facebook page for your business and using it to regularly promote products and services can be a cheap way to advertise. For instance, restaurants often use fan pages to promote new menu items or species and to receive feedback from customers.
• Local Website Listing: Many municipalities and Chamber of Commerce chapters have websites that provide listings of local business.
• Classified Ads: This is low cost way to advertise a household services, such as house cleaning or home repair service.

Newspaper Advertising

While on the decline newspaper ad can still be an effective way to reach customers. Many municipalities have special interest newspapers that can be used by business for local advertising.

Direct Mail

Direct mail can be costly if sent via post, but brochures and flyers can still be delivered directly to residences or business in targeted geographic areas.

Cable TV and Radio

While network television spots are be out of reach for most small businesses, cable companies often have local information channels that offer affordable advertising for small businesses.

Local Deal Vouchers

Advertising deals through sites like Groupon and Living Social can be a way to acquire new customers quickly without paying anything out of pocket. But the deal site takes a cut and if you've offered the customers a significant discount, you could end up giving away most of your profit .