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The Average Cost of Advertising and Marketing for Small Businesses

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |cost of advertising |The Average Cost of Advertising and Marketing for Small BusinessesThe cost of marketing for small businesses depends on many factors.

Every small business should be allocating some of its resources to marketing, either digital or otherwise. If you don’t, you’re not giving your company the best chance to succeed.

Why? Because you’re not appealing to as many customers as possible. Today, we’re going to talk about the cost of advertising for the average small business.

It’s important to remember that every field is a little bit different. An auto mechanic will spend a different amount on advertising than a retail chain. Let us try and help you come up with a budget that you’re comfortable with so you can grow your business.

Percentage of Revenue

A small business will normally spend a certain percentage of their total revenue on marketing. This is called the “5% rule”. But, depending on what kind of business you have, how much revenue is coming in, and your goals, you can expect to pay between 4-12% of your total revenue.

Small businesses and companies that are just starting out tend to allocate more money towards marketing because they need to build their customer base. When you’re an established company, you can expect things like brand recognition and reputation to carry your sales numbers to an extent.

While this “rule” applies to the average small business, you don’t have to adhere to it. If you feel comfortable spending more on advertising and you’ve got a good marketing team in place, it can pay huge dividends. In the end, it’s up to you as the business owner to decide how much money you want to spend on advertising.

The Cost of Advertising: Where to Put Your Money

Deciding how much money to spend on advertising is one thing, but the more important part is figuring out what to spend your money on. In today’s (mostly) digital world, you’re probably going to want to allocate most of your marketing resources towards digital marketing.

While offline marketing practices are still effective in many ways, most businesses rely on an online approach to find new customers. The world of digital marketing is both huge and complicated, so you’ll need to do your research to learn the ins and outs.

Many companies end up hiring digital marketing firms like Elysium Marketing business marketing to deal with things like web development and search engine optimization. There are things you can do yourself on the cheap, like social media marketing and content creation, which are both integral parts of digital advertising.

How much money you put towards each platform depends on your business. Retail companies thrive on social media interaction, while those in the services find content marketing and SEO more valuable.

If you hire a marketing service, you can discuss your financial situation with them and come up with a specific plan to suit your business.

Advertise the Right Way to Make It Worthwhile

When you look at the grand scheme of things, the cost of advertising isn’t huge for most small businesses. If you do your marketing the right way, a small amount of money can generate a lot of capital through new and returning customers. Focus on putting the right money into the right things and watch your business grow.

Did you enjoy this post? Come back and visit us again at Strategy Driven to learn new ways to improve your approach to business.

5 Tips on Marketing Your Business to Millennials

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Millennials|5 Tips on Marketing Your Business to MillennialsMillennials. It’s a generation that is coming of age and changing the way businesses market themselves. They make up nearly 25% of the US population and over 20% of consumer discretionary purchases. As Millennials become America’s largest generation and begin to play a greater role in the economy, you need to evolve your marketing strategy so that your business appeals to these 20-40-year-olds. Here are 5 tips to market your business to Millennials.

1. Use Social

Nearly 80% of Millennials use social media. While Facebook is the largest platform, they also spend their time on YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Having a presence on social media is important as it plays a massive role in developing your brand image and cultivating trust amongst Millennials. With attention being divided across platforms, it is important to diversify your social strategy and maintain a presence on each of the different platforms. However, in order for your social strategy to be effective, you need to regularly post and interact with your followers.

2. Have a Conversation

The Baby Boomer generation embraced the hard sell. Millennials, on the other hand, are cut from a different cloth. This growing generation wants to have a conversation with a brand. Having a genuine conversation and social interaction with your customers online helps foster a feeling of trust that can make them more likely to make a purchase with your brand and increases the chances of them becoming brand loyal.

3. Focus on Mobile

Let’s face it. You need to be where your customers are. When it comes to Millennials that means you need to be online (and on mobile). In 2018, Millennials made nearly 40% of their total purchases using their mobile devices, and this is only forecasted to grow in the coming years. If your online presence doesn’t work well on mobile devices, you are missing out on these potential sales.

4. Embrace Video

As a marketing tool, video is more engaging and more memorable. Therefore, it is no surprise that it is growing in popularity amongst Millennials and is being incorporated into social platforms at breakneck speed. Video marketing can increase brand awareness more than 50%, making video a key part of any marketing plan targeting Millennials. A business can embrace video in many ways including doing Live streams on Instagram or Facebook, creating and maintaining a YouTube channel, webinars, product videos on their website, tutorials on their social feeds and website on how to use a product, etc.

5. Encourage User-Generated Content

The holy grail of traditional marketing is word of mouth. When it comes to marketing towards Millennials the new word of mouth is user-generated content (UGC). This means that users are actually creating the content that markets your business. UGC puts your customers front and center and highlights the fact that your brand is open to having a conversation rather than just another sale. Another benefit of UGC is that is stands as social proof that your business offers quality products and services. Millennials are less trusting of ads generated directly by businesses than older generations. When this reassurance comes from the mouth of a peer, Millennials are more likely to develop trust in your brand. UGC can come from posts on your wall, using a #hashtag with your brand name, tagging your business in a post on their own feeds, etc.

Take Everything You Think You Know About Marketing & Re-evaluate

While the backbone of marketing is still relatively the same, the nuances that make a marketing plan successful need to be carefully re-evaluated to make sure that it appeals to Millennials. One of the great things about marketing to Millennials is that content can often be repurposed across platforms, targeting an even greater number of potential customers. One business that has been successful at this is the website Marble.com, who has created video content on some of the top topics homeowners have when deciding on a new countertop. This video content is posted on their YouTube channel, embedded on their own site, shared with their Facebook fans, and posted for their fans on Instagram. Allowing them to get more reach with their video content and meet their customers where they are. So when you are ready to revamp your marketing to target Millennials, keep these tips in mind so that you can have a greater return on your efforts.

Giving Your Business The Promotion It Needs

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

When we start a business, we are often clueless to the types of promotion that it actually needs. In this day and age, we are living in a digital world. With this, most of the focus is on promotion via means that we can access through our computers, tablets and smartphones. This isn’t to say that that’s not a good idea – more than half of the world are connected to the internet, and it’s the biggest resource that we’ve ever had in our whole history which is open to getting ourselves out there and communicating with our target demographic. So are we missing other options?

Social Media

Although on the rise, social media is not utilised as much as it could or should be. This is a vital tool in business promotion, especially as certain platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have invested so much into making it compatible for businesses – especially small businesses. Their data analytics can prove to be such a useful tool when assessing who your posts are reaching, where in the world they’re reaching and how many people are actually seeing them. You can pay to promote the posts that you’re putting up so you could have the potential of reaching a global audience. You can’t get much better than that. Make sure that you are clued up on the rules of business for each platform that you are using – they are all very different in terms of how they are meant to be used. For example, if you put out one post a day on Facebook, this could be seen as being spammy. Put out one post a day on Twitter and it’ll be history and off people’s feeds in as little as 4 minutes.

Don’t Forget Tradition – Consider The Past

Just because this is the rise of the age of technology doesn’t mean that we solely have to rely on that in order to get our brand message seen. Think about all of the traditional methods that people used back when computers weren’t in wide circulation. Newspapers and magazines are still going round, as are leaflets. Places such as Blue Bee Printing are still able to provide customers with die-cut magnets to hand out for promotional purposes – bumper magnets are still in use, as when will people ever stop driving cars? Not any time soon, that’s for sure. The more that you think outside of the box and consider what people are still going to go for are ways that you can promote your business without really trying. Handing out little things for free such as key rings, mugs and other trinkets that people can utilise within their home with a little bit of company branding on it ensures that you will always be the first port of call should they need you for the particular thing that you can provide. Letting your customers spread the branding for you is one of the best things that you can do – and that they can unknowingly do for you.

Writing a Great Headline for Your Advertisement!

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There is no denying the fact that the success of an advertisement lies mostly in the headline. The headline should grab the reader by the collar and make him want to read the rest of the advertisement. The headline should be simply catchy and various key points should be embedded when deciding on the headline for the ad.

The headline should catch attention of the eye at the first glance. Words in headlines should act as tags for the advertisement. It should say it all about the content that follows. If a company is selling reasonably priced furniture, the headline of their advertisement should be “Durable Furniture for Less Price”. This headline will attract the right customers who are on a look out for durable furniture as well as low cost furniture. If the customers to be reached belong to a category that are interested in decorating their house with beautiful furniture and aren’t concerned about the price to get the right look, then the headline can be something like this: “Change How Your House Looks by Our Oriental Furniture”. Anything other than the prospects should not be included in the headline. If both men and women can use a product, both of them should be referred to in the title, missing out even one of the category is like losing a huge number of potential customers.

The title should be an instant product seller. According to a research, five times more readers read just the headline when compared to those who read the complete advertisement. So the investment is of no use, if the title isn’t good enough to sell the product. There can be a possibility that the content of the ad isn’t strong enough. All the harm can be undone by having a powerful headline.

The headline should be centered on the product and not the company that is selling the product. The customer’s interest should be reflected and he should feel that he is directly addressed. Start with “you” and not “we”. So if the client specified mentioning the company’s name, don’t start the sentence with it. For example, instead of writing “Tylenol – Solution for a Severe Cold”, write “Got a Severe Cold? Try Tylenol”. Never forget to mention the name of the product in the headline. The product name should be of top priority.

A snapshot of the benefits of the product should be given in the headline. This is an important quality of a well-phrased headline. The customers look out for advantages when he thinks of buying a product. Keywords like whiter teeth, nutritious cereals, or miraculous growth should be incorporated in the title.

If including all these factors have made the headline long, remember to write the product advantages in bold. If a visual is placed in the advertisement, it will be a good complement. As a picture can speak a thousand words. But care should be taken that the headline should say some part of the story and the visual should say the rest. Don’t repeat the headline or the picture.

Too much cleverness should not be applied to design a headline. There are nearly five hundred advertisements in a local newspaper on weekends. A regular reader reads the headings of all of them. He will be able to classify between a false heading and a genuine heading. No false promises or information should be included in the headline. Excessively smart headlines are good for award competitions, but don’t really work with the savvy customers.

The headline should give out a positive feeling to the reader. Negativity should be totally excluded as it not only creates a negative impression but the mind will also be not receptive friendly. It sometimes confuses the mind and it interprets a negative meaning of the message being delivered. Confidence should be reflected in the headline. Don’t include any doubtful words like “if” and “but”. Conditional phrases are a strict no. The sentence should be in present tense, instead of past or future.

About the Author

John MontanaJohn Montana has been a successful salesman since 1990. He currently lives with his wife and travels between Chicago and Los Angeles. He created his site – ABMSNOW to offer tips and ideas on how to become better at selling… no matter what your product is.