You don’t need a fancy ad campaign from those “too clever” Manhattan ad agencies to do well in business. In fact, corporations waste huge amounts of money buying this type of slick advertising that usually has people scratching their heads instead of BUYING.
If you’re a small to medium business owner it’s important to get the fundamentals right. You have to know your market. You need your advertising message to be written ideally to your prospect and NO ONE else. Often businesses make the mistake of casting a wide net. You can go broke doing this.
Don’t get too clever. In fact, don’t get clever at all. People have short attention spans and what matters to someone browsing online, reading the paper or magazine, is WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?
Your marketing message should be always match your target. Always think about your prospect. How do they start their day? Do they have time to read the paper in the morning? What magazines do they get? Do they use the internet? Do they receive piles of mail?
Now that we’ve covered a few of the basics, let’s talk about opporunities.
Timing is critical when reaching a prospect. Some advertising opportunities put you in front of your target market when they are SEEKING your services, but most DO NOT.
Here are some traditional advertising choices:
Advertising in Newspapers: Unfortunately newspapers are getting thinner and thinner. That’s because advertisers are going elsewhere with their money. Newspapers are great for geotargeting or targeting people within a certain location, but you really have no clue what your prospect is really interested in. They might be age 18 or 77.
Even classifieds are going online! Craiglist’s (Craiglist is an online classified network of websites based on location) readers far exceed those who are reading their state paper’s classifieds!
Advertising in Magazines: Magazines are great ways to target demographics and get specific with someone’s lifestyle, which makes matching the MESSAGE to the market so much easier. Magazines can be very expensive for ONE RUN. It’s a hit or miss.
If you ever buy ad space in magazines, reprint it for your other marketing efforts. You can do an “As Seen In..” on your other marketing materials. This boosts your credibility by ASSOCIATION.
Advertising in the Yellowpages: The great thing about the Yellowpages is that people go to it when they are looking for someone. For example, if you are in carpet cleaning, then someone needing carpet cleaning will often use their Yellowpages to find someone locally. The bad news is that you are having to compete head to head with every other local carpet cleaner. Also, it’s not proactive advertising. You’re having to wait for them to come to you.
Yellowpages can also be VERY expensive and dealing with their customer sales team can give anyone nightmares; however this option is good for certain types of businesses.
Advertising Online: Online is the future. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t use a computer on a daily basis. It’s where we shop, we look for information, connect and communicate. It’s not going away any time soon.
Advertising rates are pretty cheap. PPC (Pay Per Click) or advertising on a site that’s targeted to your services is an excellent way to go if you’re on a budget and if you’re not on a budget it’s one of the first places to spend your marketing dollars.
PPC can be set up to show that only your ad appears on the internet in certain geographical locations, which is great if you’re geographically bound to a particular area. The only real caution is that PPC can be highly competitive and if you don’t know what you’re doing it will eat a hole in your advertising budget. Sometimes success can be a simple rephrasing of your Subject Line, which means if you aren’t in the mood to test diligently, it’s not the option for your business.
For those businesses who are seeking big bang for buck, consider the advertising online with the National Retirement Network. This program was specifically designed with your business in mind, because we give you multiple ways to ensure visibility for someone actively looking for your services.
If a potential customer isn’t quite ready, no problem, we have multiple ways of gathering consumer data so we can give them great content on an on-going basis per location, staying fresh in their mind, reminding them to come back to find a professional or a business in their area! That’s pretty powerful. We do this to ensure our advertisers get the reward.
Join the NRN Business Program!
