As a small business owner, deciding how to spend your advertising dollars to maximize impact and make every dollar work harder can be daunting.
For most, it starts with simple market observations: What advertising outlets are available? What are my competitors doing? How should I allocate my limited budget?
But in order to ensure that your advertising expenditures are wisely spent there is a bit more every entrepreneur should consider.
What to Consider Before You Spend Money on Advertising
There are three considerations every entrepreneur should take note of before allocating your hard earned profits to advertising:
1. What is my company’s overall situation; how would I define the marketing problem?
2. What are my key objectives that could potentially solve the marketing problem?
3. What exact solutions (strategies) could rectify my current marketing problem?
Every company’s answer to the aforementioned questions will be unique. This is why it’s not wise to simply follow your competition’s lead — because their marketing problem could in fact be different and their strategies won’t necessarily work for your precise situation (i.e. lack of leads, quality leads, awareness, sales, etc.)
Once you consider these things it’s time to start planning your ad spend.
Here are seven helpful advertising tips to get you and your team started:
1. Who does your brand need to reach?
In other words, who is your target audience? If you don’t know this with a certain confidence level, and you haven’t experienced prior results it’s time to define this immediately. Your target audience can easily be defined and focused using key demographics that you’ve observed via historical sales data, customer survey’s etc. The customers — that you define — with the highest propensity to purchase your product or service should be your primary target.
Do you sell urban cosmetics? If so, your target may consist of Females, Age 18-34 with a household income of $50k that reside in urban markets — also considered city dwellers. Everything about your messaging should speak to her and her specific needs. If your company fails to properly identify a correct target, you’ll likely waste energy and budgets talking to the wrong people with no results.
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