No matter how big or small a business is, it’s important to do some type of marketing or advertising for it. Most large companies do this as a matter of course, however smaller businesses, especially those just starting up, seem to take a while to get around to doing any kind of marketing for their business. This is mainly because you are so overwhelmed with things to do that the marketing keeps getting placed lower on your do-lists, but if you keep putting it off, how are your customers ever going to find you?
One form of advertising that appeals to businesses because if it’s wide audience is television advertising. However this is can be quite an expensive operation if you are a small business, especially if you are just starting out. If you really wanted to try this type of advertising without having to pay the full cost of the ad, there is a way you might be able to get it with the help of other businesses in your region.
If a few of you got together and paid for the advertising, you could get a television commercial that promoted each one of your businesses in the one commercial giving you all some promotion but at a fraction of the cost because you would be splitting the cost.
The next most popular form of mass advertising is radio advertising and it is a less expensive form that may be more suitable for your budget. The way it works is you buy segments of air-play time which can range from 30 seconds upwards to usually a minute. The cost is also dependent on what time of the day the ad is aired, with prime time being the more expensive.
Another reliable source of advertising for your small business is to place as ad in the yellow pages of the local telephone directory. The price again is based on the type of ad you place. If it’s a large full page ad it will cost a lot more than a small text based ad, but it is certainly a must to put some type of advertisement in the telephone book, in both the yellow pages section as well as the white pages.
You could set up a website or get one designed for your business. This is becoming a popular way to get word out about your business. Getting one designed can be quite expensive, but there are alternatives. You could try making your own site based on a simple user friendly content management system like the wordpress platform however you would also need to learn about search engine optimisation to get your website to rank high in the search engines.
Using these ideas will help to put your business on the radar of your potential customers. If you’d like to read more articles on small business then you may be interested in this one on finding the most suitable place for your home office.
