Small businesses cannot afford to market themselves the way big businesses do. Rather than brand advertising, which takes a long time, small business advertising needs to bring in profits fast. Here are a few advertising ideas that will get you quick results.
Share an Ad Space
If you can’t quite afford a newspaper ad, you could split it with a few partners instead. Purchase a large ad spot in your local newspaper, then, split the ad with your partners. You will often spend less money than if you bought a smaller ad only for your business. You’ll also build relationships with potential partners and build a relationship with the advertiser, leaving room for more future deals to take place.
Try Postcard Marketing
Postcard marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways you can market your business. It costs just pennies per postcard and can often be extremely targeted. If you run a local business, you can mail just the people within a few miles of where your business is located. You could even mail just to certain people from certain lists who are near your area. Because you can target people so specifically using such a wide range of options, while spending just pennies per person, postcard marketing can be an incredibly effective marketing tool.
Facebook Pay-Per-Click
Facebook allows small businesses to target very specifically the people to whom they want to market. Unlike data you get for postcard marketing or other kinds of marketing, Facebook data is submitted willingly by users and likely to be much more accurate. You can expect to pay about 50 cents per click. You can target by age, location, gender, interests, marital status, income and a lot more.
Let’s say you own a local consulting business catered towards helping small business owners get off the ground. You might use Facebook to get new customers, first starting with individuals earning $30,000 or more, or you might target people between 25 and 50, whose interests include business. You would then write an attention-catching and informative headline and advertisement, along with a photo that really jumps off the page.
Customer Loyalty Programs
Customer loyalty programs have traditionally been very successful for small businesses. For example, for every ten slices of pizza someone buys, they get one slice free. This creates the psychology of people who come back for more, especially as they get closer to getting their free slice. If there are three pizzerias with comparable pizzas in the area but only one has a loyalty program, they are likely to go to that one instead.
These are just a few small business advertising ideas that can yield results quickly. Testing any of these ideas shouldn’t take more than a month or two and the results should be apparent almost immediately.
