Starting a Small Business: Small Business Advertising
If you’re a small business startup, advertising techniques can help your business get noticed. More than 80 percent of startups make it through their first year. As exciting as this is, that doesn’t mean all new businesses ride off into the sunset and stay successful forever.
Key Takeaway You Will Get From This Article
To effectively advertise for your small business you need to brand your company well, know who your customers are, invest in content marketing, and hang out where your customers do.
Unfortunately, nearly half of startups across the country close their doors after five years. Some of these businesses are just sold to or acquired by another business, but many others shut down because of a lack of profits.
There are certainly many factors that lead to a business’ downfall, but one thing is for certain: the business wasn’t able to sell its products.
While correctly setting up your business and effectively managing your time are crucial for your business’ success, so is advertising and making your product or service as desirable to consumers as possible. Let’s take a look at the components of effective small business advertising.
Brand Your Company Well
Nailing down your brand is a very large piece of the puzzle to successful small business marketing. This means finalizing things like colors, logo, typeface, and taglines.
Let’s look at Coca-Cola as an example. Coca-Cola has a brand value of nearly 70 billion dollars, making it one of the most valuable brands in the world.
Besides its content marketing and storytelling (which we’ll get to later), Coca-Cola has perfected its brand – from its Cola-red color to its vintage Coke bottle – consumers can immediately recognize the brand’s ads.
The takeaway here? Develop a brand that consumers can easily identify and recognize.
Know Who Your Customers Are
As a business owner, your goal is to sell your product or service. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, if you don’t know a single thing about your target audience, it can be pretty difficult.
To really make your brand stand out and successfully sell your product or service, you need to know the ins and outs of your target audience. What are they interested in? What does a typical day look like for them? What challenges do they go through that your product or service can help solve?
Take the time to get to know your target audience, do some research, and build customer profiles or personas that everyone in your company swears by. This information is key to ensuring all your messaging and imagery is consistent and stands out to consumers already drowning in pesky sales ads.
Invest in Content Marketing
You know the phrase, “content is king?” That exists because it’s basically true. Everything - from your website to Facebook ads – is content. This is how you’ll tell your story and drive customer engagement.
Let’s go back to the Coca-Cola example. The brand is easy to recognize, yes. But they also use content to appeal to people’s emotions and life experiences, making the brand memorable and worth engaging with.
Want to build a loyal customer base? Using content to tell your company’s story and appeal to consumer needs and emotions is the way to do that.
Hang Out Where Your Customers Do
This doesn’t mean going to hang out with your customers in a coffee house. This means advertising on the platforms and channels your target audience spends time on (hint: this is another reason why customer personas are important!).
For example, if you know your audience spends more time on Facebook than Twitter, focus more of your small business marketing budget on promoting your content on Facebook. If your target audience prefers to use email to communicate, offer a newsletter sign up on your website to collect emails and start communicating to consumers via email.
No matter where your target audience is online, meet them there and get them to notice your brand with high-quality, enticing content and messaging.
Helping Businesses Take Off
Electronic Merchant Services is dedicated to the success of the companies we serve. Contact us to learn more about the advertising we can offer your small business. Click on the button below for more information!
