In days gone
by small business advertising was a simple task. You would call up either the
local newspaper or the Yellow Pages, get a borderline-extortionate quote and
then pay it. Advertising was expensive, but it was simple and, when done well,
it worked. Today the opportunities for small businesses have proliferated and
become much more targeted thanks to the internet, but with so many options
available it can be difficult to decide which the best fit is for you.
Ultimately,
advertising is only worth the money if it drives people to buy your company’s
products or services. So here’s a run through of the main opportunities you
should consider investing your advertising budget in, in order to reach your
target audience and generate leads for your small business:
Google Adwords
Adwords is
the single biggest system for small business advertising. Google will display
your website’s ad above results generated from particular searches. Choosing to
display your ads against the results that relate most to your business will
increase the likelihood of people clicking through to your site.
Ads can be
up and running in just a few minutes: simply set up an account, write your ad,
link to the relevant pages on your website and pick which words you want to
appear against.
There are
two pricing models: PPC (pay-per-click) charges you a set amount for each time
a person clicks on your ad and goes through to your website, while CPM (cost
per mille – Latin for 1000) charges you for every 1000 times your ad is
displayed. The amount you pay for each ad is based on the popularity of the
keywords you want it to display against and the number of competing bids for
the same keyword from other businesses.
CPM costs
less than PPC but you’re paying for ad views, which doesn’t necessarily mean
traffic. PPC only charges when someone actually clicks on your ad. As such, it
costs a little but you can set a maximum budget for each campaign.
Google is by
far the most popular search engine, attracting around 65% of all worldwide
searches in 2014, so Adwords is the first place to go if you want to put your
business before potential new customers. However, the flipside of this is that
with so much competition, the most popular words (those that get the most
monthly searches) are heavily contested and priced at higher rates.
One way to
get around this is to advertise against searches related to your business’
location. These terms will likely have less competition and therefore cost less
to advertise against. People searching for a local product or service are also
more likely to find what they’re looking for and make a purchase. Another
method is to advertise against longer, more specific searches. These are
searched for less frequently but have significantly less competition too so you
can potentially hoover up a large amount of very relevant traffic without
breaking the bank. However, this will require you spending more time
researching search terms to target. Adwords has a very handy keyword tool that
help with this by providing suggestions as well as letting you see the number
of searches each term gets a month and the amount of competition it is
generating from other companies.
Facebook
Facebook,
with over a billion active users around the world spending on average over six
hours per month on the site, is another great target for online advertising.
Small business owners can set up a free business page and then spend money on
paid ads to promote your page or website. Business pages can be used to keep
your followers updated of upcoming company news, events or special offers as
well as to provide an extra outlet for customer service.
Advertising
on Facebook is highly targeted. It uses the personal information from people’s
profiles, such as location, age, marital status and likes and interests to
decide if they would be interested in what you sell. So a wedding dress maker
in Bath, for example, could target local profiles of people with an ‘engaged’
relationship status to catch the eyes of couples planning their upcoming
wedding.
Be warned,
Facebook’s ad builder can at times be restrictive. For instance, images can
only be one size and displayed in a certain place and ads that breach its terms
and conditions (from content that’s judged to be inappropriate to phrases such
as “as seen in the Guardian” that try to piggyback on other brands) will be
withdrawn.
Google Plus
Recently, I
found that 33.7% of small business owners had a Google Plus account, second
only to Facebook (44.2%) in the SME sector. Google Plus has become more popular
in the last year with over 500 million users recorded at the end of 2014.
This year Google
launched Places for Business which lets you create a company profile to be
displayed when the business is returned as a search result. Signing up to
Google Plus and creating a Places for Business entry means customers can
quickly and easily find information like your business’ opening times, contact
details, location and products, increasing the chances of you making a sale.
Google’s ultimate aim is to provide its users with relevant information, which
locality is a big part of. So providing these details in your Places for
Business profile will be rewarded with a higher rank in search results and
increased traffic to your site.
LinkedIn
Voted the
most business-friendly social media platform by the Wall Street Journal,
LinkedIn specifically seeks to connect like-minded professionals. A great
resource, especially for business-to-business companies, LinkedIn ads make it
possible to advertise to an extremely niche and well targeted audience. You can
choose which people to display your ad to based on their industry, job
function, seniority, geography and more!
LinkedIn
groups are also another way of identifying people with a potential interest in
your business. Advertising to these with relevant content can drive large
amounts of traffic to your site quickly and relatively cheaply.
Daily deals, vouchers and discount
codes
Groupon,
Wowcher and MyVoucherCodes are just some of the names in this space. For
restaurants there are similar options like the Tastecard diners club. Sites
like these will want a steeply discounted deal to push, alongside your
advertising cash – but for some local businesses the results can be
spectacular. Be warned though as some small businesses have had problems: if
you get your sums wrong up front and a loss-making deal proves more popular
than expected, how would it affect your business?
Instagram
Instagram
lets you take photos using your mobile and apply a wide range of photography
filters to give them a more professional look. These are then shared by users
on other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It was recently
purchased by Facebook and as such it’s introduced business accounts and
seamless sharing. Another nod to the business owner, Instagram ads, is definitely
a space worth watching for the future.
by Grant
Stanley 2015
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