Running a business means focusing on all sorts of areas to keep things afloat, as well as pushing profits and expansion forward. It’s not surprising that you may feel at a loss as to where to focus your efforts and energy when it comes to maximising potential and driving things in the right direction. If you’re stuck for choice, a key area that you might want to take a look at is advertising. Every business needs to advertise its goods and services to not only ensure customers know that they exist, but to also stand out from the competition, driving business throguh their own doors and payment portals, rather than losing out to someone else. Of course, coming up with advertising campaigns can be difficult work, so here are a few suggestions that can help you to get this journey started out in the right direction!
Getting Started
If you’re planning on focusing on advertising, you need to consider how you are going to go about working on your campaigns. There are a few options that you can try here and there’s no right or wrong answer. Only you will know which best suits your business and its needs. The first option, which the vast majority of smaller businesses opt for, is outsourcing. When you outsource, you can use the services of a freelancer or an agency to complete advertising campaigns and work for you. The process of creating and launching campaigns can entail planning, story boarding, content creation, monitoring and more, so by using an agency or individuals, you don’t have to hire a huge number of people to get the job done. A second option is to hire a marketing team. Bringing marketing in-house has the benefit of having a dedicated team on hand who can create ad campaigns on an ongoing basis.
Types of Advertising to Consider
Digital Advertising
At the moment, one of the most popular and commonly engaged with forms of advertising – for small and medium sized businesses, in particular, is digital advertising. This makes sense. When you think about it, advertising is designed to catch people’s attention and, nowadays, a lot of people spend a lot of time online. Digital advertising is also much easier to monitor and track. This gives you more data to work with, allowing your business to make more data driven decisions that allow you to edit and alter campaigns over time for maximum impact and profits. Of course, digital advertising is a really broad term. You may want to look into social media advertising where you work with social media influencers to create posts including your products. You might want to look into PPC (or “pay per click” advertising) where you can create budget friendly campaigns and only pay for traffic that has actually been driven to your site or target destination. You might want to look into SEO campaigns, which ensure that your site appears first in search engine results for keywords associated with what you sell and traffic heads to you rather than a competitor. Whatever you choose, setting a budget and sticking to it is key.
TV Advertising
TV advertising tends to be something that many small and medium sized businesses don’t really dabble in. This is often because people mistakenly think that this is purely the playground of major businesses and corporations. But this doesn’t have to be the case. There are plenty of channels and time slots that can target your chosen demographic at a much more reasonable cost than prime time slots. Generally speaking, you may want to use a specialist agency when it comes to creating these types of ads. You may find that Brantley Davis Ad Agency Named One of Washington DC’s Top Agencies is a good fit. This is because you’re going to be investing a fair amount, so will want to get your money’s worth.
Print Advertising
Print advertising is by no means outdated. People still walk around the real world and observe their surroundings. This is where leaflets, posters and billboards can prove to be good options. Of course, you’ll need to research where your target demographic spend time to make sure that you can place your ads in the right spots to attract their attention. You will need some kind of marketing specialist, a graphic designer and copywriter at hand – freelance or in-house – to create your ads.
Hopefully, this brief introduction will help you to come up with a plan for advertising campaigns that work for you and your business!
