Once you have arrived at the decision that you need to advertise your business or services, the next thing you need to decide is where to start.
This decision will depend in part on what you are advertising, and the marketing niche you are going after, as well as who will be managing the advertising, you or an agency.
With regard to this decision, you need to take a realistic look at how much you are prepared to spend. In addition, you then have to determine how much help you want or need, versus how much you are willing or able to do yourself.
Your budget will affect the types of advertising you can do, and this helps determine where you will start. For example, TV and radio are out for most of us, larger newspapers too. However, there are still a great number of offline and especially online advertising opportunities you can take advantage of.
Your advertising decision will also be based upon the type of business you have. If you are an online business, it makes sense to advertise online. However, with offline advertising being a bit more slim than it used to be, you might see the chance to capture market share by trying to migrate people offline to coming online to see all you have to offer.
Finally, you need to decide just how professional your ad copy is, and whether or not you need professional help to produce it, or to set up and manage the campaign.
Managing campaigns offline can be very different from the kind of technical, and tracking and testing skills required for an online campaign, so once again, think about all the components that are going to go into advertising your company first before moving onto the second level of decisions.
In the next section we will deal with various different kinds of advertising, and where to go for these types of advertising.
