Business Advertising on a Budget
A start up business has two problems – low customer flow and low cash flow. In order to increase customer flow, you need to advertise. In order to advertise, you need cash flow. It seems like a conundrum that you cannot escape from. But business advertising on a low budget is possible.
There are some aspects of business advertising that it is not advisable to tackle on your own. These are the more technical aspects of advertising – the ones that can cost you a lot of money for very little return if they are not tackled correctly. One of those is Google Adwords.
Google Adwords done right can bring a great return on investment, but you need to have the campaign set up correctly and have the money to invest in the campaign in the first place. Unfortunately, this particular form of pay per click is not the cheapest around and if it is not done right you will get plenty of clicks but not a single lead and all that time and money is wasted.
On the other hand you have Facebook advertising. This is far more affordable and a great means of advertising to the consumer. Facebook offers a wide range of targeting options – you can get pretty specific in terms of age, gender and interests. This is very different to Google’s approach of search term targeting. For a consumer driven business, Facebook is a far better option than Google Adwords.
Then there is content creation. You do not have to hire someone to write for you if you want to take this approach to business advertising. All you need to do is take the time to write on a regular basis. You can write about pretty much anything that your company works on. You could post about recently completed jobs and the challenges you overcame and how happy your client was. There is the option of how to or DIY posts. Even simple informative posts are well received. Even if you have not done much in the way of keyword research, you will get some good SEO credit for your unique and specific content.
You could also expand this content creation to include SEO. Spend a little money to have someone who knows about SEO put together a plan for you and get a little SEO training. Then simply apply the plan and wait patiently for Google to cotton on to what is happening.
While you wait for the SEO to take effect you can boost your business advertising efforts by creating social media pages on Facebook and LinkedIN. Promote the posts that you write and garner a following on social media. The more shares and likes you can get, the better. A small budget boosting your post can go a long way to getting leads coming in while you wait for that SEO to bring in the volumes.
It is possible to do business advertising on a small budget if you are tactical and are willing to put in the work.