Getting the marketing for your small business right is perhaps the most crucial aspect for the survival of your business. However most offline methods of marketing for small businesses have been very ineffective. Quite often you are paying for advertising in inappropriate places were your target market is not even looking.  You have no idea of whether the advertisement is effective and you are often wondering why no one is buying your product or services.

The internet however has changed the way marketing for small business takes place; it has taken it to a whole new playing field. A small business can now rid themselves of ineffective marketing that is costly with little or no return.

So what has changed the marketing for small business?

How do you let people know about your business? Flyers, brochures and classified ads are some of the most popular ways.  This can be costly and without testing is a hit or miss (often a miss) effort.

For as little as the price of an annual yellow pages advertisement a small business can now have a website for a lifetime (plus a small annual fee for hosting) that can potentially be seen but the whole world. A visitor to your website is like having a customer in your store.
You can explain exactly what it is you do, educate, demonstrate and sell your product and services to your customer without them having even entered your office or store.

With high speed internet you can add audio and video to your marketing efforts enabling you to communicate to your customers.

A printed advertisement often leaves you with little control, unaware of how effective the marketing for your small business is actually is. You have no idea how many people have seen it, if it was the right demographics of people, how the people responded when reading your advertisement. As you can see there is little or no control over it.

The internet also lets you roll out advertising campaigns for little or no cost and test the effectiveness before investing a lot of money into them.  Unlike a yellow pages advertisement that once it is done “it is done”.  You can test an ad and if it isn’t working you can change it immediately and try something else (with no extra cost).

If you like once you are having a good response with your online advertisement you can then if viable roll out your campaign in print.

So firstly you can create your advertisement and test this advertisement on free classified websites you can use tracking software to count how many times people clicked on your link. From your classified ad you will send your visitor to a page tailored specifically to the reason you were advertising for. On this page you will have an immediate call to action (ask the visitor to do something) such as subscribe for a free report, buy a product or call your office. Then you can also implement tracking software onto your website to see how your customer is behaving on your site. So you can determine whether the text is communicating effectively to the visitor to make them take the desired response you want.

With all the benefits of small business marketing online why wouldn’t you do it?

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