What are the most effective ways to advertise a small business?

[Elizabeth_K]

As all of the best answers begin, it depends. When you’re choosing how to advertise, you want to get in front of the right audience and you want to get the most bang for your buck. It’s a tall order!  While there are more traditional forms of advertisement like newspaper ads and tv and radio spots, there are also lots of ways to advertise online too — this is where Constant Contact can help! Let’s go on a little journey...

The first stop is social media marketing. Regular social posts are the cheapest and quickest way to advertise, and it can get you in front of a “somewhat known audience.” If you have a healthy social media presence with lots of friends and followers, your content has a good chance of being seen and shared with others outside of your social circles. On the flip side, if you are just starting out, your content can easily get lost in a sea of content until you start to build an audience. So, what can you do with these two scenarios?

• If you have a social presence, start by keeping a regular posting schedule and make sure to share a Sign-up Landing Page. You can do this through a social post or you can create a “Link in bio” landing page and include it there. This takes your friends and followers out of an uncontrollable social media world and brings them into the realm of email and SMS marketing. (More on that in a second.)
  
  
• If you’re just starting a social presence, make sure you are posting regularly, share a Sign-up Landing Page, and also give Facebook and Instagram Ads a try. These kinds of ads can be targeted to different demographics on Facebook and Instagram to extend your reach beyond your existing friends and followers. Social ads help get you noticed, and you can drive the ad traffic to your website or to a Sign-up Landing Page to entice those who are interested to opt-into email and SMS marketing. There is an extra cost to this type of advertising that is paid to Facebook and Instagram, but with the amount of information these companies know about their users, their ad targeting is pretty powerful. It’s comparatively cheaper than traditional forms of advertising, and you get to set the budget and timeframe you want your ads to run for. Make a pitstop to read this article and learn more about Facebook and Instagram ads. 

The second stop is email and SMS marketing. This is a great way to advertise to a “known audience.” Your contacts opt-in to receive your emails and SMS messages and you let them know about the sales, promotions, and events you have going on. You can see who is the most engaged and create targeted content for different segments of your audience based on things like location, interests, and engagement. You have way more control over this audience because your list belongs to you, and you have powerful tools for segmentation and automation to help you better reach them.

The third and final stop is using Google Ads to reach a completely “unknown audience.” This helps you attract new business from people who may not be aware of you on a larger scale. Google Ads works very similarly to Facebook and Instagram Ads, but you’re not pigeonholed into a specific social media corner of the internet. There is also an extra cost for this, but Google is so widely used that your money goes very far. When you create an ad, you select your target demographics, your budget, and your timeline, and Google presents your ad to its users accordingly. You get to choose the website you send your prospects to, and it can be your website (with a sign-up form clearly visible) or a Sign-up Landing Page.

To bring it home, the general strategy is to leverage the web to grow your email and SMS contact lists so you can more effectively nurture relationships through targeted marketing. All of the tools we’ve mentioned  (social posts, email and SMS marketing, Sign-up Landing pages, Facebook and Instagram Ads, and Google Ads) are accessible through your Constant Contact account, and give you lots of flexibility as you’re starting your journey, or even if you have already long left the station. Let us know what you’ve been using and how it’s been working for you — we’d love to hear!

[Abigail_S]

Always so insightful to read your advise, @Elizabeth_K! I love that you refer to it as a journey, because that's truly what marketing is! You have to find your own path and see what works best for YOU! Everyone's path is going to be different. Find your groove and run with it. 

I've seen a lot of success in social media advertising, but this one seems to be the most daunting. If you've thought about advertising on social media, but haven't yet- what's stopping you? 

[Elizabeth_K]

Aw, thanks! 💖

[Nick_S]

I know some people might find it kind of creepy if you were just on, say, a mattress website and then you scoot over to Facebook or Instagram or even a random webpage and suddenly you're seeing ads for mattresses from different brands popping up (I kind of felt bad when I purchased a mattress online and then started getting the ads; Sorry, chums), but honestly there is something to be said for targeted advertising. There are so many brands, so many products/services/events/etc. that cover all interests and all walks of life, that without targeted advertising we would just be bombarded endlessly with things that have zero relevance to us. And I imagine, as an advertiser, you want to get the most bang for your buck and that holds doubly true for smaller businesses and nonprofits that don't necessarily have the backing of a big enterprise.

All of this preamble is just to point out why social media marketing, such as paid ads on sites like Facebook and Google, are so important and so effective. The tools available that let you leverage your existing audience to find new prospective customers or specific keywords that bring your ad to people interested in those keywords, means that your money is being spent on actually putting your products or services in front of the people that want to see it. Just my two cents.