Whether you have an established company already or are trying to start a new business, advertising is the number one issue that you could be concerned with. You must successfully promote your business either privately or through an advertising agency. If you do not do this you can pretty much be sure that your company will die out. Without new business coming in the door at all times you won’t be able to grow your business. Constant and loyal customers are extremely important to maintaining your business but new customers is what makes it grow.
Advertising Agencies
A good creative agency will have some fresh ideas about how you should use the marketing agency or ad agency to promote your business. The great thing about hiring an advertising agency is that you don’t need to know anything about marketing or advertising. You can leave that responsibility up to them and focus on the other aspects of you business. An advertising agency will be able to keep up with the digital world of marketing as well as have a good grasp on what needs to be done offline in order to let people know who you are. That’s half the battle: letting people know who you are and that you even exist. Once they know that, the battle gets a lot easier.
Private Marketing
If you choose not to go with an ad agency and market your company or business privately then there are a few things that you should be aware of. One of those things is that you need to balance your marketing schemes between online and offline.
Online
There are several different ways that you can advertise your company online. These include a knowledgeable use of social media, search engine optimization, pay per click ads, email marketing and of course, your personal website. Let’s look over each of these in a little bit more detail so you can get a better idea of what is involved in advertising.
- Social media
This goes beyond the link in your Facebook profile to your website. You’ll need to constantly know what is trending on each media outlet in order to fully take advantage of the benefits that social media offers in advertising. - Search engine optimization
There are various ways that this is done including taking advantage of keywords and links. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes for search engine optimization so even if you decide to privately advertise, you would probably benefit from outsourcing the search engine optimization side of things. - Pay per click ads
Usually the way this is done is to give the search engine a lump sum in the beginning to run your ad on their page and then they will take from that every time the ad is click until the fund is depleted. At that point that will either be taken down or you can renew the contract if you feel you were getting enough business from it. - Email marketing
Email marketing is done by sending out potential customers information and discounts to their emails. You have to be careful with this so that your email does not get caught in a spam and sent to junk folders.
Offline
Even though most people do use the Internet these days, there are people that still look at flyers, business cards, billboards and signs. These don’t need to be covered individually because we don’t know what they are and they serve the same purpose; they capture the attention of those not swept up in the digital age. Offline marketing can be a little bit more expensive but if you know what you’re doing then you don’t have to spend your entire life savings on it. If you were telling somebody about your business then you need to have a business card to offer them. There is nothing more unprofessional then promoting your business only no if you were telling somebody about your business then you need to have a business card to offer them. There is nothing more unprofessional then promoting your business only to not be able to give them any physical information at the end of the conversation.
You may find that it is more beneficial to hire an advertising agency. They will will do a much better job than you could.