When you finally reach the stage where you are ready to share your business with the world, it means you’re ready to advertise. But advertising can be a little overwhelming, after all, where do you being? What is the right platform to get your name out there? Is it digital? Is it print? Radio? Social media? A billboard? The answer could be all of the above!
Here are the 8 ways you can advertise your business:
But how do you create a marketing strategy? There are many steps to this process and it can be a complicated one, needing to dig deep into what you want to get out of your business and relying on the minds and talents of those on your team who are specialists in their areas. However, to get you started, here are four points to get you going on planning out your marketing strategy.
To know your audience, you have to seek out their needs and be able to solve all of their problems before they even have any. You can discover this using different research methods, such as surveys, focus groups, paying attention to analytics, demographics, reviews, conversions, and other online behaviors. To go even further, you can create buyer personas to make a generalized representation of your different types of customers and how to attract them.
Quickly rising in the ranks of being one of the easiest, most convenient, and accessible ways to advertise your business, social media is a funnel that practically everyone has the access to, whether or not they are looking at their social feeds 24/7. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, Pinterest, Snapchat, and even TikTok have the ability for paid ads. Some are more straightforward than others and they all appear differently on each platform, but all can be customized to be seen by specific or generalized audiences.
Paid search is when search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, feed you the ads you see. Advertising on these search engines is done by pay-per-click (PPC) or by bidding on keywords. PPC’s really make your advertising prowess by allowing you to target people who are already searching for what you are selling. Depending on the budget, you can also place ads on the top or side of the search. These can also be referred to as banner ads, where rather than just using text-like ads, you use a visual representation.
Whether it be a poster, flyer, newspaper/magazine ads, or any type of physically printed promotion, it is considered print adverting. Granted over the years, print has most definitely shifted into the digital world, but print is still alive. A wider audience of people will see print ads, maybe people who weren’t even looking for your type of business.
Billboards and public ads, like those on buses or trains or slapped on a wall, are still a popular form of advertising. Just look up on the highway (just for a second before focusing back on driving) and you will see more billboards than you even realize. Because of their size and placement, billboards and public ads are seen by many different groups of people and can promote awareness across the board.
Radio these days doesn’t just mean the typical FM/AM radio. While that is surely still a way to advertise, now we can bring in other forms of ‘radio’ such as Spotify, Pandora, and Sirius. If you don’t pay for a paid subscription to these platforms, then you will most certainly hear commercials, commercials you are forced to sit through before returning to your music. So why not advertise here where all your listeners have no choice but to listen?
Like radio, TV commercials don’t just mean what’s on your local or national television stations anymore. Now it includes, Hulu, Amazon TV, and other network streaming platforms. And just like the radio, without a paid account, you are sitting through the commercials indefinitely until the show resumes. TV commercials are a great, given costly, way to advertise your business whether if it is on the good-old-fashion TV or a streaming service.
Whether an event is in person or virtually, events are a great way to get your business out there to an already established audience. At the event, you can either have a banner, representatives, free gifts, flyers, and whatever else you can think of to get more eyes on your business.
One of the older forms of advertising, direct mail can be anything from postcards and pamphlets to catalogs. While these methods aren’t as popular as they once were, many companies still use this method to get their business out there. However, email advertising has now become the new form of direct mail by using newsletters and promotions digitally, rather than physically.
Doing a deep dive of marketing research into your business can be a good indicator of which method of advertising can be right for you. It could be one it could three, it could be all of them. Just be sure to see all aspects of a method from reach and deliverability to cost and analytics.
