How Can Advertising Help Your Business?
Right off the bat, even a layman could answer you that it’s impossible to run a successful business without any form of advertising. This is why the question in the title was never formulated as “Is advertising necessary for a business?”. When it comes to how this is where things get a bit blurry. You see, you don’t really have to understand how something works in order to use it efficiently. This is why a lot of people fail to even scratch the surface and try to list/examine all the perks that their business gets through advertising. With this in mind and without further ado, here’s how advertising can help your business.
1. Attracting first-time customers
The first thing worth addressing is that the biggest step in doing business might just be your ability to attract first-time customers. This is troublesome, seeing as how it’s a matter of blind trust in your product/abilities, without a prior instance of doing business with your brand. Now, we’ll talk about return customers a bit later on, as well as the concept of the customer lifecycle. Still, for any of these to take effect, you need to persuade them to take the first step. This first step is, naturally, the first purchase.
2. Reminding old customers that you’re still there
The next thing you need to do is remind your customers that you’re still there. Roughly 40% of all your profit is generated by just 8% of your regular customers. This means that there are people out there who did business with you and are likely/willing to repeat the act. The only thing that’s happening is that they might need to be reminded about this from time to time. So, put the word out there and they’ll come flocking back. It’s an incredibly low effort for such an incredible return.
3. Helping people embark on a customer lifecycle
The thing is that a lot of people need at least seven interactions with your brand in order to become paying customers. This means that they need to see seven different forms of your brand’s promotional method or just encounter some of them a couple of times. Sure, this could be done organically and spread through WOM. In other words, you do a good job and someone recommends you. Once they hear enough recommendations, they might contact you even without any advertising. The advertising, however, is just quicker and more reliable.
4. Announce a new product/event
Previously, we’ve mentioned that your old customers might return if you were just to give them a reason to come back. Well, how about if you were to give them an extra reason. A lot of people may be out there waiting for your new product without even being aware of it. Are they going to refresh your website or ring you in order to ask about new products? Such a scenario is not very likely. Through advertising, you can announce a new product or event or even use this presentation in order to build up hype around it. This means artificially generating demand even if there wasn’t too much of it at the start.
5. Mark your territory
As a small business, chances are that you operate in a relatively small territory. For instance, as a one-person landscaping company, you literally have zero benefits from exposure across the globe. Chances are that it’s cost-effective for you to operate only in your nearest surroundings. So, you can hire billboards, plant flags, and corporate banners, or even distribute materials like flyers and leaflets locally. Even with digital marketing methods like SEO, you can easily narrow down your area of activity. The key thing is that it gives you a chance to increase your local activity.
6. Measurable ROI
When done professionally, advertising gives you reliable and easy-to-measure ROI. What does that mean? Well, with email marketing, for instance, an estimated ROI is 4400%. This means that every time you invest a $1 if everything goes right, you stand to get $44 back. Sure, with old-school (analog) marketing, tracking and measuring ROI is really not that simple, however, case studies are quite conclusive. When you start looking at advertising as an investment opportunity, it suddenly becomes a much easier business opportunity.
7. Increasing brand awareness
Brand recognition is a fairly simple thing – people are able to recognize your brand name and line of work. However, past recognition lies in brand awareness, which is somewhat harder to achieve. For this to work, you need to find a way to educate people a bit more about your brand. What’s in your offer? What makes you different from everyone else in the field? Is there a hidden perk to doing business with you that they’ve failed to notice so far? Keep in mind that the more complex the question is, the more complex format you’ll need.
8. It’s a scalable solution
It’s impossible to imagine a modern business without advertising. Regardless if you’re a one-person enterprise or a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate – you still need a website, you still have social networks, and you probably still print t-shirts. While the difference between company sizes and advertising budgets is great, everyone’s doing (more or less) the same methods. Since it’s scalable, it’s also fully customizable. This means that you’ll easily make it fit the needs of your brand. Also, even if you do have to transition to another method/company, later on, the experience that you get from these early collaborations is going to be completely invaluable when looking for partners in the future.
In conclusion
In the end, advertising is a tool that you use in order to get your spot in the niche. Every industry (no matter how big), has a certain number of contenders, all fighting for a part of the same audience. How big of a part you’ll get usually depends on the amount of attention that they can generate. This is why using proper advertising forms and formats has the potential to change everything. With the right advertising strategy, you have the potential to outperform even some of your far bigger competitors.
Author bio
Harrison Buckley is a business consultant. He has a deep passion for technology and on days when he is not busy at the office, he writes to share his knowledge with the world. He currently works for a hoardings Sydney company.