Small Business Advertising

If you have or own a small business then undoubtedly you are interested in advertising.  Even in a down economy, those who are not doing any advertising at all are bound to get hurt by their lack of action.  In fact, most studies have proven that the small businesses that do best in a recession are those that spend the same amount or even increase their spending on advertising.  So let us take a look at some of the options for small business owners and what they might be able to do to drum up some extra business.  At the time of this publishing, the economy happens to be in a recession here in the U.S., but these principles still apply regardless of what the economy is doing--whether it is booming or busting.

In a lot of cases, a small business is not going to have a huge budget set aside for advertising.  In face, some small businesses do not need or want a ton of extra customers coming their way; they might just need to establish a decent flow of activity to keep them profitable and busy.  So they are not going to be looking to air 30 seconds of television commercial during the super bowl or anything.

Instead, small businesses might look to cheaper, but still effective, guerrilla tactics in order to advertise their business.  For example, if you run a florist shop, you might go the local library and put your business card in all of the books about flowers as if they are bookmarks that got left behind.  Or you might try some Johnny ads in the bathrooms of local businesses to drive some interested customers to your small business.

Recently there is a trend away from mass media and traditional advertising in newspapers and such.  One problem is that readership is dropping rapidly and advertising on media such as television is expensive and not well targeted.  If you are going to spend serious money on advertising your small business, you want to be sure that your ads are well targeted and having a real impact so that you are not just throwing money away.  It is getting harder and harder to do that with traditional media sources as people's attention continues to get more and more scattered.  Newspapers are dying and people are spending more and more time online.  As such, it might make sense to abandon traditional media and look to online advertising for your small business.

One of the best options for a small business is to advertise online.  There are basically 2 routes that the small business owner can go in this case: pay per click or organic search (seo).  Let's take a look at both options, as they are both viable ways to advertise and build a small business.

With pay per click advertising, you are bidding on keywords that people search for in the search engines, and you are literally paying directly to drive traffic to your website.  So let's say you are an attorney in New York City that specializes in drunk driving cases.  In this case, you would bid on terms like "new york attorney" and so on.  Every time someone clicked on one of your text ads, you would pay a dollar or two for the click, and that person would land on your website.  Let's say for every 50 people who did so, you earned yourself a new client.  Depending on how much you charge for your services, this might be a very good deal, and you could scale your business up accordingly.  You could also optimize your campaign and bid on different keywords so that you are paying less and less per click and still driving new business to your website. 

The other route to go is with organic search or SEO efforts.  In this case you would build your website so that it is naturally getting visitors from search engines for free.  Since this traffic is not paid for and continues to show up over and over every day, it is quite valuable and can become a huge, long term asset for you.  So if you can optimize your legal site so that it is naturally receiving daily traffic, then that is a powerful long term strategy and could keep you with a steady flow of new clients.