How to Take the Next Step in Marketing Your Small Business

Start-ups rarely have unlimited marketing budgets, and it’s likely that your initial investment in marketing your new business will have been restricted to some degree by your modest budget.

New companies often opt for free or low-cost forms of marketing, concentrating on building their online presence with a website and social media accounts, with any spare cash going into the cheapest forms of targeted advertising. Now your business is more established; it’s time to look at investing more in your advertising so that you can capitalize on your progress so far.

Why you should invest in marketing

The money you spend on marketing can seem like a good way of spending a lot of money with little to show for it. When you purchase stock or pay your staff’s salaries, you have a quantifiable outcome for your investment. Marketing spend is far harder to quantify, and it’s true you could easily spend a small fortune on various forms of advertising and have little return.

• The art of good marketing is to use your investment wisely, and target your advertising so that you are getting your message across to exactly the right people – those who are most likely to buy from you.
• You should have a good grasp of who your ideal customer is, based on the niche you’re operating in and the demographics of people who are going to be interested in your offer.
• You then need to create marketing campaigns and publicity materials that appeal to these potential customers, grabbing their attention and making your product or service seem irresistible.

As long as you have these fundamentals nailed down, you should be able to make the best choices when you start to expand your marketing efforts.

How to expand your marketing

If you’re currently paying for a weekly ad in your local paper, it’s not reasonable to make the leap to full-page spreads in a national newspaper. It’s all about scale: gradually increasing your presence in line with the increase in revenue. So, for example, you could look at changing your black and white ad for a color one, make it bigger, or start advertising in other local publications. Video is a powerful tool for advertising, and with so much video content online, you have plenty of potential platforms for a video advertisement.

You don’t even have to employ someone to make your video for you, however. There are many examples of successful advertising campaigns made using amateur video or stock video. You might need to invest in some decent filming equipment and editing software, but at this stage, all the tools you need are available to you without spending a fortune. You can even tag your video using the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST), and check your ad using the VAST tag inspector tool from Vastinspector.com.

If you want to increase your revenue, you have to be more ambitious in your advertising and marketing campaigns, but don’t get carried away. Make your strategy and investment scalable and keep your costs under control to achieve the best results.