Small Business Advertising – Optimizing ROI

When you say 'small business advertising', all you hear is 'small'. In your mind, a picture is inadvertently created: low finances, low profits, and low business levels. It need not be this way, however. Agreed that when you speak about small business, the budget for advertising would be minimal, but that does not mean in any way that the profits too would be small.

Quality Vs Quantity Always Counts

When you have a small budget you are often tempted (and advised) to use free advertising boards, forums and other low or no cost methods. My advice here is that you avoid these methods like the plague. Rather, use this money to hire someone to write a few dynamite articles about your business. The articles should be no less than 300 words and no longer than 500. They should be written in a friendly, yet expert tone geared to hold the reader's attention from beginning to the end.

Now, take these articles and submit them on various ezines and free article directories with a three-four line resource box where you give reference to your business. This is an inexpensive method, which could explode the traffic to your business almost overnight.

Viral marketing is another exceptional method of marketing, which costs virtually next-to-nothing. Here all you have to do is create an email, e-book, or something similar, which is qualitative, and of interest to the market segment your business targets. Now send this material to your existing email list and watch your business grow exponentially. What happens is that when a person receives your email and finds it good and useful he or she would like to send it to their friends, relatives, and colleagues so they could also benefit from it. As the email is passed on, the message about your business also goes along. The result would be a boom in business.

As you can see, small business advertising can be done well even on low budgets. So, never ever settle for any less.