Small Business Marketing Options

So you are a small business with a tight marketing Budget, what do you do now?  Well there a several sources you can spend your marketing dollars.  First there is Print Media but before you spend a whopping source of your marketing budget on print, you have to ask yourself a couple critical questions.

1. Who is your target market and will this effectively reach your target market?
2. What is the Call to Action?  Is there any Call to action?
3. What is the purpose of the marketing campaign?

Is this for branding just to get someone familiar with your name or is this to generate revenue.  If you want to actually generate revenue, you need to have a call to action.  If print, you may want to consider putting your website address on the ad.   Print is relatively expensive and has a very short life.  Typically, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are a real estate agent!   There are better sources to allocate your money including online marketing.

Another small business marketing option is to go with radio airtime. This has an even shorter life and can really only be effective if you are trying to gain brand recognition versus immediately generate revenue.  A good use of radio advertising is for fast food, soft drinks, and other stuff that a consumer can have quick access to while driving a car or truck.

Another and in my opinion, the best source to allocate your small business marketing budget towards is online marketing.   When a consumer needs most any product or service, one of the first places they will go to find the product or service is the internet and most likely some form of a search engine.    This is why this marketing medium is so important, because chances are, it impacts your business and if you aren’t taking advantage of it, your competitors probably are.

Online marketing is also one of the most efficient marketing mediums as well.  Once you have optimized your site, you can continue to gain the benefits of the cost well after the cost is forgotten and out of your marketing budget.  But, I wouldn’t toss the SEO firm aside just yet either.  Having someone continuously monitor and increase your visibility can be very impactful in the long run.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Brad Henry's Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.