Planning Your Small Business Advertising
Many small businesses tend to be afraid of dealing with professionals when it comes to developing a strategy to promote their businesses.
Many seem to think that an advertising campaign on the television is all that is necessary or perhaps a website will get things moving. Maybe a few ads in the local newspaper will bring in some business.
And all those options can work and you can achieve your goal of getting more customers coming through the front door of your business but it would be a bad mistake to assume that any of those options work well as a stand-alone approach.
Television advertising is fine but it needs to be followed up or augmented with other forms of promotional activities too. Last Saturday I talked about Going Beyond Advertising and mentioned that Toni and I were having breakfast with a friend to help him look at ways he could augment a small television advertising campaign that will soon be happening.
That get-together certainly gave him things to think about but one thing that was very obvious was that getting something up and running to operate in conjunction with those television ads is not going to be easy. He didn’t plan for them, he looked at the television ads as being a stand-alone option and didn’t realise that, for the best impact, he needed to have other options in play at the same time.
And that is the key to what I am trying to say here. If you want to advertise and promote your small business you need to have an approach that includes a variety of advertising and promotional tools. Of course the local television station is only going to talk to you about advertising on television, it isn’t interested in advertising in the paper or anywhere else.
But you need to be aware of those other options and you need to have a strategy in place that will involve those other options and you need to allow time to get all those options in place and ready for use.
It’s no use signing up for some television ads and then suddenly wondering about what else you can do when the televison ads are going to air in just a few days. You need to plan well in advance and allow plenty of time to get everything ready.
You might even need to have someone write a creative brief for you. Now don’t be scared by a term like that. Instead wander over to Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings and read what he has to say about the subject.
You will find that what he has to say is very informative and it will certainly demystify the whole process for you. Pay particular attention to this part of what he says because it really is the key to launching an effective advertsising campaign.
The first draft is never the best draft. Nor the second. As a result, copywriters need to be given sufficient warning of an upcoming job and be provided with enough time to do the job well.
As a copywriter who seldom gets enough time or enough information to do the job correctly all I can say to that is:
‘Hell Yeah!’
