4 Questions You Need to Ask Before Advertising Your Business

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In advertising, you should know and apply the proper strategies necessary in running a campaign that lets you maximize your costs. Therefore, before advertising your business, ask yourself these 4 basic questions:

Why advertise?

There are countless of reasons why you should advertise your business.

  • Build brand recall and loyalty
  • Create awareness, customer interest, or demand
  • Launch a new product or introduce a new feature of an existing product/service
  • Change consumer perception about your product/service
  • Build brand and company image/identity
  • Counterbalance competing brand’s advertising
  • Gain consumer trust and favor through Corporate Social Responsibility Ad efforts
  • Boost and support sales

From these reasons,  you should narrow them down to what you want to accomplish by figuring out the product or service you plan to advertise. For instance, as a dentist, do you plan to increase public awareness through your advertisements or launch a new promo? For real estate agents, are you planning to position yourself in a specific spot in the market?

Depending on the what you are advertising, you will have to choose between a message that highlights your brand or the other that highlights your product. It is highly discouraged to try and do both on a single ad.

When to advertise?

There are two key indicators when a need to advertise arises:

  1. When your sales have gone up on significant levels and stabilized, allowing you to gain enough budget for advertising
  2. When you feel the need to create brand identity or build brand image if you have failed to establish it during the first stages of your business

Both show that you have the initiative to become a valuable player in the industry. Other competing brands who can afford to advertise will soon recognize you as a market competitor, so better be ready.

However, advertising is strongly discouraged if you have yet to reach your sales to an acceptably high level. Since advertising – in particular mainstream advertising (TV, radio, print) – is relatively expensive, you will be forced to shell out cash for the sake of your brand identity.

Where to advertise?

This relates to the media you should use and their placement, both of which are determined by a third party (advertising agency) once you hired them to make your advertising campaign materials. Here you will discover how carefully planned marketing collateral such as vinyl bannersbusiness cards, and sticker printing are designed according to plan.

To give you a basic knowledge on determining what media you should use and placement, the two main determining factors are product positioning and target market.

For example, high-end brands like Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Apple iPhone 5, and many others have a target market from people in classes B/A up, you might want to advertise minimally on TV and heavily on print (especially magazines).

Other factors that affect this would be the kind of product being advertised and how you want your market to recall your brand. In terms of placement, this would be determined by the level of exposure and time of exposure of the target market on the said media.

How to advertise?

For small businesses, advertising through TV and radio might be a little too expensive. So what you should do is to make use of the avenue that is more affordable for you like print advertising strategies.

Here are several print products and marketing strategies you can make use of to advertise using prints without spending too much.

Direct Mail Print Advertising – You could design ads and send them directly to your target market’s doorsteps. These can be in the form of postcards, greeting cards, or any print platform that you can mail flat or inserted in an envelope. Take advantage of holidays and create ads that are intended for such special occasions (hint: Father’s Day is just around the corner).

Posters – You can creatively design posters and put them up at places where there is a high concentration of your target market. Make creative designs that are short, simple, yet witty.

Business Cards – You can  turn your business cards into print advertisements simply by changing its design. Instead of simply putting your logo and your contact details on your card, make a witty design that will entice your audience to buy your product/service.

Should you have additional information, insight, or you simply want to share a personal experience about the topic, please do share it with us by writing a comment below.

2 Comments on "4 Questions You Need to Ask Before Advertising Your Business"

  1. Car stickers are great and fun at the same time!

    If you're a small business with an online presence, you might want to consider google adwords.

    Sharing my two cents worth. Cheers!

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