Small Office, Home Office Information

If you advertise your small business or home based business where do you advertise?

Do you have complete control over where your advertising appears?

Of course if you advertise in the newspapers you do have some control over that advertising but what if you advertise on the Net and have your ads placed by an advertising network? How much control do you have then … and is it really important?

Some recent research has found that wrong positioned ads do damage brands and if you follow the link you’ll be able to read more about it.

Wow … my how time flies when you’re busy. It’s been over two weeks since either Toni or I have had a chance to come in and do a brain dump.

One of the hardest things for many small businesses … especially those that operate from home … is to advertise their services. The usual advertising channels are both expensive and not all that effective anymore but here is one way of advertsing your business that is both cheap and often gives you the chance to respond to enquiries instantly.

Toni had this embroidered on some shirts for our web design and hosting business in Hervey Bay a few months ago and ever since then they have been doing a great job of advertising our services. Any time I head out of the office - and remember, I work from home while Toni works from our office downtown - I slip one of these shirts on.

I can be going to the bank, the post office, the supermarket or even just to pick up our car from the mechanic - wherever I’m going I wear the shirt and it attracts leads. A couple of days ago I was picking the car up from the mechanic after some major repairs and the office assistant asked about a website for her small part-time business.

Standing in line at the bank or even sitting with Toni in a cafe and having coffee are all places where we’ve picked up leads from advertising on our shirts. It’s cheap and very effective and if you’re not using it to get your business out there in front of potential customers then you’re missing out.

If you’ve tried newspaper advertising without much success here’s a little story that might interest you.

About five weeks ago CopyText Online and Total Website Management (our combined team) built a new website for a client here in Hervey Bay. While Hervey Bay Jet Ski was mainly aimed at the local market there was also an attempt to attract leads from further afield because the business is the only Kawasaki Jet Ski dealer north of Brisbane.

With all new websites that we build for clients I carefully watch the search engine listings as they begin to appear because we just don’t offer web design, we offer search engine optimisation with every website we build - and this one is doing very well for nearly all the important terms. However good rankings don’t always translate into leads and sales so I like to keep in touch with the client to see what’s happening at his end.

On Friday I dropped in to the business to see how the website was performing from the client’s point of view. It’s always a bit of a scary time because sometimes you just never know if a website is going to live up to its expectations or not but this time I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

In the client’s own words - “I’ve had more phone calls from the website than I’ve ever had from any of my newspaper advertising.”

Now obviously that’s not going to work every time and it may not work for you but having a website built by an experienced web design team like us is something that you should seriously think about if you want to generate leads and sales for your business.

And how many sales has it generated? I’m not at liberty to reveal that but let’s just say that our client is extremely happy with his website!

Well this has been one crazy week and the fact that one of our competitors here in town has given us some free advertising has really left us scratching our heads. We don’t know whether to laugh or write to them and thank them.

Sometime last week one of our competitors sent out a glossy multi-page brochure to every small and medium sized business in town that they thought might interested in paying them to design a website. Included in the brochure was a list of their current clients and one of the clients websites they claimed as their own was one we had built and currently manage.

Anyone who looks at it will see our name and our links on every page plus we know this client quite well and he will happily tell anyone who calls that he gets the best service from us. He’s well-known around town and his opinion tends to be respected by many other small business people in town.

You just have to love free advertising like that

by Stuart Livesey 

Knowing where … and how … to advertise is critical for small business and especially so for those who operate from a home office.

And remembering to insert the link to what you’re talking about - and then proof-reading the piece you’ve just written is equally important. Finding out a week later that you’ve done none of those things and now can’t remember where the link was always leads to a serious red-face moment. DUH!!

While this very brief article isn’t specifically talking about advertising if you will find some interesting figures that may help you when you’re thinking about advertising. They certainly don’t apply in every situation - for example radio and local newspaper is a big mover and shaker in the area where I live - but you will still find them helpful.

Some of the most effective advertising can say a lot without actually saying much at all.

by Stuart Livesey

Ok, perhaps it’s time to pull together the threads in the four posts I made last week about small business advertising.

1. You must engage your readers with a headline that resonates with them and their needs/wants.

2. Your ad needs to tell a story that ultimately offers your reader some hope in finding a solution to their needs/wants. And it needs to tell that story in words that your target audience understands - and in as few words as possible.

3. Using colour is good - but black and white can be just as effective. If you’re going to use colour make sure that the text in your ad is still easily read and doesn’t disappear into the background colour. Don’t be afraid to use white space - white space can be an emphasis - trying to fill ever nook and cranny in your ad with information will be counter-productive

4. Make sure the ad is complete before giving the go ahead to have it published. It’s easy to miss vital information so don’t be rushed at this point.

5. Don’t rely solely on the staff from the newspaper. Take control and responsibility for your own advertising because it will definitely pay off.

Other posts in this series:

Some good small business newspaper advertising - all things considered, this is a very good ad

Not so bad small business newspaper advertising - it could have been better.

Poor small business newspaper advertising - a bad use of colour.

Ugly small business newspaper advertising - oops someone forgot to put the name of the business on the ad.

The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Ok, over the last three days we’ve looked at some small business advertising in the local newspaper here in Hervey Bay that has ranged from not too bad to downright ugly. You’ll find links to those three posts at the bottom of this one.

Now it’s time to show you a small business advertisment that appeared in the local paper that really tells a story, looks good and is going to interest people. But before we come to the ad I should say that this town is full of retirees who have kids spread far and wide across the country so the headline of this ad for this small business is really going to have an impact on lots of people.

It packs a punch because it addresses the needs of a lot of people in this community, it doesn’t hide the message behind a whole lot of unnecessary fluff, it includes a call to action and it’s readable because it uses colour in a way that doesn’t hide important parts of the ad.

Other posts in this series:

Not so bad small business newspaper advertising - it could have been better.

Poor small business newspaper advertising - a bad use of colour.

Ugly small business newspaper advertising - oops someone forgot to put the name of the business on the ad.

The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Okay so we’ve had the ugly in local newspaper advertising for small business and we’ve had the bad in local newspaper advertising for small business so perhaps now it’s time for the not-so-bad in local newspaper advertising.

As you can see it certainly has a headline that grabs your attention and, if you’re a pain suffer (like I am), it engages you but it fails in one important area and certainly leaves me with a slightly negative impression. It offers no hope for relief from that pain and if there’s no hope then there’s no reason for me to call.

Do you agree?

By the way, I should explain about the lines that are blurred. This lady operates from her home … and happens to be our next-door neighbour - and I wasn’t comfortable about revealing her home address to all and sundry on the Internet.

The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Yesterday I started this little series about advertising in the local newspaper by showing you an ad that fell right into the downright ugly category. It wasn’t ugly from a visual point of view but it left out one vital detail - the name of the business - and you can see it here.

Today’s example of small business advertising falls into the ‘bad’ category. Once again, you might think that it doesn’t look all that bad (and it doesn’t once it was scanned and enhanced on the computer) but as it appeared in the paper important parts of this ad were unreadable.

You see, the colours in the text blended into the background colours to the point where most people would have had trouble reading the text.