You have a product that you know will do well in the market, but you do not know how to advertise your business. Promotions are a crucial part of getting customers to buy the products or services that you are offering.
It is not enough that you have the supply, pricing, and everything else right without knowing how to put your business in front of the right customers.
And getting your business in front of your target audience is one goal of marketing. Advertising can be a powerful tool throughout the customer value journey.
Today, marketing possibilities are endless. This is possible with the rise of digital marketing. The traditional ways could still bring in customers and add to that what the digital world offers.
It is 2020 and you have all the ways and means made available for you, both online and offline, to market your business.
Knowing how to advertise your business within Cleveland and even outside it through digital marketing will greatly help propel your business forward.
What You Need to Prepare Before Advertising
Before diving into the different ways of marketing, you need to have the assets prepared before you launch. And an understanding of the customer value journey is important.
You can think of the customer value journey as a roadmap for your target audience from being aware of your brand to becoming loyal and raving fans. There are stages and each requires a specific type of advertising.
Identify your target audience
Knowing who to communicate with will make wonders on your brand messaging, style, and identity. It will also help you know where to find them and what their demographics are.
Know their nuances, habits, and products they’re currently using. Connect through their own words. Tap into their emotions and know the root cause of their problem.
These are all important information on how you will formulate your brand and what advertising method you will use.
Establish your brand
Is your brand quirky or elegant? Do you want it light and feminine? Or, strong and manly? Whatever you wish for your brand to exude, list it down, and build your brand guide.
Have your brand guide ready, complete with the logo, color palette, and other design elements. This will serve as your creative and marketing team’s guide on how they will market your products or services.
Your brand voice is important as your defining factor. It must be consistent across all the platforms that you choose to utilize. And it will help your ideal clients locate you among the noisy marketing landscape.
Find your Unique Selling Proposition
Advertising could be easy once you get your products or services in front of your target audience. And the best way is to present how your product or service is unique.
The pricing must also be right. And you must convince them that their problems will be solved once they buy and use your product.
All these are needed for a successful campaign. Once you identify your unique selling proposition, your ad creatives will also follow.
Build your website
Having a website today is almost a requirement. It establishes your authority and positions your business as an expert. It exudes professionalism and credibility.
A website that contains all your contact information including your email address and phone number ensures that your potential clients will find you. And having one is the start of taking your business online.
Traditional Ways on How to Advertise Your Business in Cleveland, Ohio
Traditional ways are still effective in converting your target audience into paying customers. There is still a percentage of the market that rely on traditional means of communication.
Hence, if your customers do not, or rarely, go online, then, these could be the methods that you can explore.
Write a press release and get published by reporters.
A press release is meant to be a story that is released in certain publications. It could be about your product written in a journalistic way, complete with a headline and ends with a call to action, which is essentially your ad.
Pitch to reporters and have them publish your write-up in their newspapers like Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer or magazines, online or not. You can also pitch to a local station.
There are news stations in your immediate community that you can connect with. Just format the text to be easily readable on-air and conversational.
Advertise on television and various print media.
This is still one of the many effective ways for potential customers to discover your business. However, going this way could be expensive.
Host events.
Promotional events like trade shows are most effective when your potential customers get to experience the actual product or service.
Hone your public speaking skills. Do a live demonstration that can help convince them to buy and heighten their interest.
Join events.
Network with people and other small business owners that can help you grow your business. Partner with them to advertise your business while you cross-promote them in return.
Do you have a referral program? You can get it rolling by having affiliates.
Digital Ways on How to Advertise Your Business
Your website can host a lot of information. You can even put as much content as you can to give value to your site visitors with the end purpose of converting them into paying customers.
Content marketing is where advertising and publishing meet.
Its role is to drive the customers from being aware down to the customer value journey until they engage, subscribe, convert, and later become promoters of your brand.
This is done by simply giving value through content that your ideal client avatar consumes.
Always give value through various content across different platforms for your customers to get their attention, retain it, and later ask them to buy.
Here are some things that you can consider:
Give free content through lead magnets.
Lead magnets are what you give your potential clients in exchange for their contact details. Examples are e-books and printable. And having their contact details is powerful as you can always retarget them in your campaigns.
Sometimes, your audience leans more on visual content. And webinars provide you an avenue to talk more about your business and how your offers can help your potential clients.
Your target audience shows up to your webinar and they trade their time to listen to you. That means that you are closer to convincing them to buy your offer.
Advertise through blog posts, videos, and audio podcasts.
These types of content can greatly influence your customers’ decision to buy. With the information just within the reach of digital natives, they perform research before deciding to contact a sales rep or go to the physical store.
And these pieces of content that are advertising your products or services could convince them to contact you and buy.
Amass good reviews and testimonials.
Your reviews and testimonials provide future customers with social proof. Strategically place these at the forefront of your website and social media pages and let the experience of your past customers attract new ones. It is like an online version of word of mouth.
Drive traffic through SEO.
Search engine optimization provides you free traffic. This means that you are not spending a dime every time a customer visits your website and see your ads.
This is a good way to advertise your business in the long run because of its organic nature, but it takes time.
Boost your local SEO and invest in geofencing.
For small businesses that want to dominate the local scene, you need to invest in boosting your search engine presence through Google.
In the search engine, the relevant businesses surrounding a location-based keyword show up on the map.
You can leverage this by registering your business correctly and this will serve as a source of free traffic to your ads, too. If you want a more targeted area, then, geofencing marketing could help you out.
To start, you can get a local SEO report to look for areas of improvement or opportunities in your rankings.
Run paid ads.
Pay-per-click advertisements drive paid traffic to your website. This is much faster than SEO. But since this is paid, you need to use your resources wisely and use target keywords effectively.
Social media platforms also offer ads like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to name a few.
Social media marketing is a good tool to drive traffic to your website. You can lead them to read your blog posts, join your mailing lists, and build a community of loyal customers.
Social media is a great avenue to engage with your audience and build that connection that results in trust.
And once that connection is established, then, it is much easier for you to persuade them to buy later.
Delve into email marketing.
This can be done by first building your mailing list using your lead pages. In most cases, they subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for the freebie.
This provides you another way to advertise through newsletters or get them to check out your website where the ads are.
Change up your e-mail signature! You can even place a call-to-action there.
Connect with bloggers as your affiliates.
In the online world, blog content can contribute to traffic to your website through backlinks from other blogs. And if you give them referral codes, they can do the advertising for you for a commission.
Conclusion
Advertising is simply having to connect your product to your target audience with the right messaging and content so that they will buy.
There are traditional and digital ways on how to advertise your business.
While the traditional means could be effective, these methods are also more time-consuming and expensive. On the other hand, going digital transcends time and space.
One more thing to consider is hiring a marketing specialist or building a team solely to advertise your business.
But if you cannot afford to hire one directly, then, partner with Milia Marketing now and start formulating your digital marketing strategies.
