Traditional forms of advertising don’t work for a lot of businesses: television, radio, print ads, billboards; unless you have a marketing department with a six-figure budget (or more likely, a seven-figure budget!) you can forget about these methods of sharing your message.
But that’s okay.
We’re going to look at some ways that you can inexpensively advertise. And it’s likely that these ways are more effective anyway. Why? Because the traditional ads – mentioned above – are interrupting ads, which means they disrupt the regular flow of the TV show, the radio show, the magazine article, or the view from the road, to tell you a message. People are becoming very good at ignoring the interrupting ads.
Before we go through some of the alternatives, it’s important to note that you should have some idea of what you need your advertising to do. By this, we mean that you should have some kind of business plan or marketing plan to help you outline how much you can spend on marketing, how many prospects you expect that marketing to send to you, how many prospects you need to turn into customers, and how much money each customer needs to spend. Once you have these numbers in your business plan, you can look at the various marketing methods to see which ones could work best in your business.
Pay-per-click ads. We’ve talked at length about pay-per-click ads, which are ads that you pay each time someone clicks on them and ends up at your website. They’re great because usually the people who click are interested in what you have to offer. If your ad tells them what it is you’re selling, there’s a good chance that they’re more likely going to buy from you.
Permission-based marketing. This is a great way to get customers. If you have a website that offers people the chance to sign-up for an email newsletter, you’ll be able to market to them again and again. By offering valuable information in your newsletter, your prospects can read and keep the information and you’ll be positioned as the expert: the person they will turn to when they need the service you provide.
Back-end sales. You may have heard of the term “loss leader.” It’s a business term used in both offline and online sales and it means that someone buys something from you for a price it is so low you take a loss on it. Of course, your job is not to lose money, but you’re willing to take a loss on the first product in exchange for an opportunity to market to them again and again. One online example might be an e-book that is given away for free with some valuable information in it, but with clickable links to more valuable information (for sale) in the book.
Word-of-mouth. There really is no better method of advertising than from word of mouth. You can get word of mouth advertising in one of two ways; both are effective. You can encourage your happy clients to refer other people to you or you can do something that creates buzz and has people talking about you over the water cooler. The first way will require you to provide real value and great customer service. The second way will require you to “think outside of the box” and do something zany.
How much do the above advertising methods costs? Nearly nothing! Pay per click advertising often costs just pennies per person. Permission marketing is a fixed cost whether you have 10 people on your list or 10,000, and it’s usually the cost to prepare the newsletter and distribute it. Back-end sales will only cost you what you lose in the front end sales. And word-of-mouth advertising may not cost anything, depending on what you choose to do.
The price is right. The methods are effective. Go get those customers.
