Small business owners hear one thing above all as they build their firms: you need to advertise. And they do. The trick is that most advice on “advertising” assumes that small business owners can throw thousands of dollars at the problem and wait months for the results to come trickling in.
As a small business owner, especially if you are bootstrapping your venture and operating on paper-thin margins, that kind of advice is useless.
Small business owners need to understand the difference between advertising practices that apply to big businesses that can afford to waste money and time learning how to advertise effectively and those that can help small firms avoid going bankrupt by experimenting with this kind of expenditure.
Forget Most Rules of Thumb
Many advertising consultants, experts, and business educators have written guides about different kinds of advertising over the years. The vast majority of these guides are useful to businesses that already generate respectable amounts of revenue and have well-defined marketing functions in operation.
The advice provided in these guides covers various topics ranging from awareness campaigns to multi-channel advertising to complex attribution models.
No problem! If you are a well-resourced, big-business marketing manager.
The most important rule of thumb to recognize as a small-business owner trying to explore advertising options at a manageable cost is that you must switch your paradigm from thinking of advertising as an overhead that you can not quantify toward an expense that is trackable and can return specific measured value based on your spend.
Explore channels and platforms where you know exactly what works and what does not. You should no longer be guesstimating the impact of that local radio ad.
Which Platforms Are Worth It?
An insight that can help separate firms that make advertising work for them without bleeding to death from constantly experimenting with advertising is platform choice.
The right advertising platform allows small business owners to control their expenditure closely, select the target market they want to reach, and review their performance metrics after each campaign.
A cpm ads network gives small business owners firm exposure to thousands of potential clients across multiple websites without the expense of attempting to negotiate ads on the most suitable websites to their target market. Business owners do not have to waste time implementing and tracking dozens of ads on separate sites, each with its budget, timing, creative requirements, and loopholes.
This is how smaller firms can still compete with firms operating with thousands of dollars in ad budgets: They select the right channels that give them multiplied exposure without added expenditure or complex tracking processes.
Make Sure Every Dollar Counts
The key to successful advertising is keeping the expenditure below the worth of an average client. Easy-peasy! Yet so many small business owners fail to track their spending and understand this simple proposition.
Let’s say the average customer spends $200 when they interact with your firm. You need to ensure that all the customers you acquire through advertising do not cost more than this value. Costs you acquire customers for should be way below this mark. $50 each seems about right. Such a model is guaranteed growth.
Business owners who fail to understand this principle of advertising tend not to have successful outcomes because they let their budgets run wild. Digital advertising can manage this concept in ways that traditional advertising has never afforded small businesses.
Spotting Your Customers
One of the advantages small business owners have over large corporate firms is their innate focus. As a small business owner, you likely know exactly what the problem your ideal customer has is. You probably also know exactly who those customers are and why they hesitate to buy from you. And what kind of language resonates with them.
Your only challenge regarding making advertising work for you is taking all this insight and putting it into an advertising campaign that reaches these customers without making you pay an arm and leg for simply getting the advertisement out into circulation.
Modern channels of advertising afford the kind of precision that only well-structured and large firms used to enjoy. You can target the ideal customer you are hunting down for every dollar you spend and hone in on their perceived interests, the sites they frequent, their browsing behavior, and their demographics.
An artisan furniture maker can target customers interested in artisan furniture. A local service provider can target clients in a specific neighborhood or town, and an online service provider can target people looking for a specific offering. The capability of modern advertising platforms is now available to small business owners who want to test the concept of advertising instead of big firms with deep pockets.
Flexible Formats That Suit Your Budget
Not all forms of advertising fit small businesses with limited budgets and resources. Video advertisements can take significant time and budgetary resources to construct, and complex agencies can require the level of scrutiny and skills only established firms may have.
Display advertisements, banner ads, and native ads work incredibly well for small businesses looking to test the channels of advertising because they are simple for small business owners to implement themselves. They require no special agency skills or programs. The other forms of advertising often drain small business owners’ budgets without working.
A proper ad will work exceptionally well for small businesses when they give customers a good reason to click on the ad and require minimal input on the part of small business owners to generate clients.
Grow Gradually at Your Own Pace
Some small business owners may be hesitant to invest in advertising for fear of their businesses growing exponentially and outpacing them.
Digital platforms allow small business owners to scale back their advertising needs considerably. Digital ads can all be turned off within seconds. Other forms of advertising with long-term commitments may still deliver a huge return for an extended period, growing your demand in a way you cannot keep up with.
This flexibility is one of the great advantages of building a small business. Small business owners can choose which times of the year or month they invest in advertising channels according to how busy they expect their operations to be.
Sustainable Growth
Small business owners should avoid seeing all small business failures as the “miracles” of advertising. Most honest growth in businesses happens gradually as entrepreneurs find suitable channels for spending on advertising and scaling back processes that do not work.
The pattern that emerges in successful small business owners who use ads across multiple platforms is, however, considering advertising as part of their core business function rather than spending time on it only after everything else has been done in the firm.
Successful small business owners reflect on budgeting for advertisements weekly instead of waiting until they have busy daily periods in their firms.
The firms that have the most difficulty in considering advertisements as part of their functions are those that do not track which channels return customers that spend significantly more than the firm spent acquiring them.
The model that tends to work best for small business owners is viewing ads as part of their function while ensuring they use platforms that give them multiplied exposure without wasting time, effort, or resource on processes that do not work.
A penny for your thoughts?