Anyone setting up a small business will soon be besieged by people selling advertising. The difficulty is telling which advertising is likely to be cost effective for your business. Few small businesses can afford to pay a professional advertising agency, but the common sense application of a few simple principles can help to make your advertising pay.
Market Research
Before even considering where and how to advertise, it’s best to think carefully about your customer or client base:
- Who are your target customers?
- Where do they live?
- What media do they read, listen to or watch?
- What are they looking for?
- What is the best way to tell them you can provide it?
How a Market Survey Helps Cost Effective Advertising
Most small business owners probably have a fairly good idea of the answers to these questions, but it’s usually worth completing a simple DIY market survey or customer survey to provide more objective and reliable answers.
Armed with these answers you can avoid the ever-present temptation to splash out aimlessly and instead make considered judgments on:
- The geographic areas where advertising will be most productive.
- Which media would find your target customers most accurately within those areas.
- What message you should put over and how.
Choosing Your Advertising Area
How far people will travel varies widely for different businesses. Customers’ postcodes obtained from a survey are a simple and accurate way to determine your catchment area.
Advertising outside this area is relatively unproductive, except as part of a deliberate expansion, but it’s sometimes difficult to discover the area covered by a particular advertising medium; distribution areas for telephone directories and Yellow Pages are often arbitrary and inconvenient and radio and television coverage is even more problematic. Take care you're covering the area you want, but no more.
Choosing your Advertising Media
Some customers will be actively looking for what you have to offer- "pro-active customers", others need persuading - "passive customers".
To attract “pro-active customers” a permanent Yellow Page or local newspaper listing or internet web page saying who and where you are, what you offer and contact details is normally enough. Only if you have many competitors should it be necessary to spend on more prominent advertising.
To attract passive customers, or to advertise a particular event, product or service, higher profile advertising will usually pay, and choosing the most cost effective advertising medium is critical. For all but the smallest businesses it’s worth considering the full spectrum of advertising media. Broadly speaking, in rising order of cost, these include:
- Local newspaper and magazine advertising
- National newspaper and magazine advertising
- Leaflets, flyers and mail drops
- Roadside signs and billboards
- Internet Advertising
- Radio Advertising
- TV advertising
For more on the use and limitations of these media, see "Advertising Media for Small Business".
Creating an Advertisement
You don’t have to create your advertisement yourself; an advertising medium will always turn your ideas into presentable copy.
But an advertising agency is expensive, and using experts isn’t necessarily better, and there’s so much easy-to-use publishing software available nowadays that preparing your own ads, at least in the printed media, is fun and quite easy if you follow five simple rules:
- KISS "Keep it simple, stupid". Decide on a simple message and put it across boldly. Don’t include too much in one ad.
- Always highlight who you are, what you offer and your contact details.
- Use colour, images and artwork boldly to add impact.
- Check and re-check the detail. A single typographical error can waste the whole advertisement.
- Position, position, position as the estate agents tell us ….. and size does matter.
Free Advertising is Best of All
Finally, always be alert for the chance to interest your target media in a newsworthy and topical story about your business. It can be quite easy to get free publicity with a well targeted snippet of news.
Tony Allen - In 2004 I began my "fourth career" as a freelance writer. In my first career, after training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, I ...
