The Future of Advertising for Small Business

Lying salesmanAre you a business owner who feels like your wasting your money on advertising for your business?

If you're advertising the way it's always been done, you probably are.  Advertising for small business has changed and the old rules from the old guard just don't work anymore.

Trying to figure out what advertising works and what doesn't is a major challenge for most business owners.  Everything sounds good on the surface, especially when it's pitched by an experienced salesperson, but in the end, we usually end up disappointed with the results.  Many business owners just give up all together on paid advertising and concentrate on organic ways of attracting customers through channels like special media and in-person events and shows.

These are all great avenues to pursue and you should have them as part of your marketing mix, but before you throw paid advertising out the window, you should take a look at how you are executing your advertising strategy and if it's in line with today's most effective advertising methods.

Old school advertising is fading fast.  Mass mailers and full page newspaper ads rarely work, even with expert word-smithing and a great offer.  Why?  Because the new way of advertising isn't about reaching a mass audience with a generic message, it's deliver pin-point, specific messages to smaller, segmented audiences.  In short, it's delivering personalized and relevant messages to each of you customers.

That's hard to do when you spend a few grand on a full page newspaper ad hoping to reach 50,000 generic people.

Targeted messaging that's relevant to each individual consumer is the new way to advertise.  Fortunately, there are ways you can reach a mass audience while still delivering specific messages to each person.

The more specific and relevant the message, the more likely they will engage with you and eventually become a paying customer.  The key to advertising today, whether it's online or offline is:

  • Laser targeted messaging to select audiences, no generic mass mailers
  • Reaching your audience through a variety of channels, no “all in” on one advertising platform
  • Using technology and other methods to track your ROI, no more “pay and pray” approach to advertising
  • Analyzing your results and making continual improvements, not a “let's keep doing it because everyone else is” approach

So what can you do?

Email

Instead of creating one master email list that you send the same generic message to each month, create multiple lists based on customer behavior and demographics.  If your customer has purchased product “X” in the past year, add them to a special list where you can send targeted emails about that product and additional products they may be interested in.  Most email marketing services like Mailchimp and Constant Contact provide the tools to create segmented email lists and can automatically add them, or move them to different lists based on a variety actions they take.

Print Media

If you're used to sending one generic “big sale this weekend” advertisements, consider creating smaller, targeted ads that appeal to a very specific type of customer.  Instead of a generic ad in your local paper, consider a targeted ad in a local publication that caters to seniors or other specific segment of the population and offer them a very specific product/offer.  Break down your advertisements based on specific services and products you offer and look to market them to specific niche audiences, like a flyer at a local church offering a single product or service.  The more relevant the offer, the higher the conversion.

Website

Create specific landing pages for each of your products and services.  You can focus your marketing efforts into sending specific people to specific landing pages.  An example would be to create a Gluten Free advertisement in the local paper for your bakery where you advertising a special website address (URL) that brings visitors to the Gluten Free page you set up.  This method almost always leads to better conversions.  Going to a local community event?  Create a special “Thank You” page that addresses people from the event that visit your landing page.  Point is, don't direct everyone to your homepage, it's like someone asking you where the jeans section is in your store and you directing them to the front entrance….doesn't make sense.

Pay Per Click

This form of online advertising lets you create laser focused messages to very small segments of your customer profile.  You can create dozens (or hundreds) of different ads that sell a single product or service and can send specific messages to different people, paying only when someone takes action on your ad (clicks on it).  If you sell a service that both seniors and young adults use, you can create two entirely different campaigns with different targeting and messaging to each of them, but in the end, still sell the same service.  All this, and you only pay if someone takes action and goes to your website (see about landing pages above).  You can create text, image and video ads that can reach your audience anywhere on the internet, even on social media.  There is no other advertising medium that gives you such detailed analytics, making ROI calculations easy.

Sidebar: Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is not an simple thing to get into, read this article to find out more about it.

Tracking and Improving

Track the results of your online and offline advertising.  Use special offer codes, analytics tracking (Google Analytics) and good old paper and pen tracking to see what is working and not working.  Keeping track of where your leads are coming from is the first step in making improvements in your advertising strategy.   Little improvements over time is the best strategy.  Test all aspects of your advertising, from the copyrighting to the mediums you are using and get better each time you run another ad.  Create multiple versions of your ad, using different headlines and offers and see which one pulls better.  That's how big companies test, so should you.

Sidebar: If you want to learn more about online advertising, read my previous article on the topic.

 How will you make your advertising campaign work?

Taking a segmented and methodical approach to your advertising is where small businesses should be.  Mass advertising for the most part is too expensive and not nearly effective enough to warrant such big spends, despite what you've been told by your local sales rep.  All of this takes time, research and patience, but if you take this approach seriously, it can pay off for you in a big way.

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.
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