What Are The Smartest Ways To Advertise Your Business?

In our last blog, we highlighted the extreme importance of providing excellent customer service. Among the many reasons why a focus on the customer experience is so important was the fact that it fosters word-of-mouth advertising. Industry experts continue to agree that the best ways to advertise your company is to allow your customers to do it for you. And there’s no better way to encourage them than to make them happy!

On Forbes.com, Dave Lavinsky discusses the fact that major corporations pour millions of dollars into elaborate television advertisements. TV commercials are nothing new. But, every year, the annual Super Bowl becomes a broadcasting event that is as much about the commercials as it is about the NFL’s championship game. Lavinsky notes that smaller businesses obviously can’t afford such advertising avenues and recommends something he feels is much more effective anyways.

“The majority of small business advertising should be put in one place – advertising to your current customers,” he insists, “The fact is that most businesses spend way too much money advertising to get new customers. And once they get them, they don’t fully leverage them. Rather, by advertising to your customers, they will buy from you more often, buy higher priced items, tell their friends about you and so on.”

For start-up businesses, an approach to marketing requires some research. Obviously, without an already-established customer base, it’s pretty difficult to rely on word-of-mouth promotion. Nevertheless, the advice about how to advertise is similar. It’s important that business owners get a good handle on who they’re advertising to. Knowing your target audience, says Thomas Smale on Entrepreneur.com, is the first step to developing a smart advertising strategy for a small business.

“Many small businesses don’t run adequately targeted campaigns, despite the fact that targeting is one of online advertising’s primary advantages,” he writes, “Indeed, you should be able to create an accurate target customer profile based on the data you’ve collected. With this information in hand, and what you know about your current clientele, you can begin to target similar demographics and psychographics with your campaigns to attract more customers.”

Smale also contends that companies shouldn’t just focus on who to advertise to, but when to advertise. This is especially true for seasonal businesses. Knowing that the end-of-year holiday season always makes for increased sales, he suggests that extra ad money be set aside for marketing campaigns that can help your company to “keep pace or even outmaneuver” its competitors.

“At first glance, advertising year-round and spreading out your budget equally month-to-month may appear to be a wise and commonsense approach,” says Smale, “But if you think back to your business launch, odds are you did a lot of things that can’t be scaled. There’s no way for you to sustain a similar marketing and advertising initiative throughout the entire year. If you sell seasonal products, you should be advertising in your highest-performing seasons.”

At Synergy Merchants, we have over a decade of experience working with Canadian business owners who have utilized our unique merchant cash advance program to advertise their companies. We remain committed to helping small to medium-sized business owners secure the financing they need for their advertising campaigns.

Allow us to help you to launch your next marketing campaign. For more information about our quick and easy merchant cash advance program, or to get your free, no obligation quote, give us a call at 1-877-718-2026 or email us at info@synergymerchants.com!