Should a small business advertise?
by Fred on 07/02/08 at 12:54 pm
2 comments
I read somewhere about a marketing guy in Proctor & Gamble who said: ‘To make a product successful, we do three things:”1. Advertise. 2. Advertise. 3. Advertise.“‘
This may be cool for P&G with possibly the biggest ad budget in the world, but what about us little guys? As a small business, when is it good to advertise? This is an interesting question, and there’s certainly no ‘one size fits all’ answer. I have tried to formulate a framework, which I’ll outline in brief here:
Step 1: First, get the right people in the right roles in your company. Advertising is all about promise, and if you do decide to advertise, having the right people will ensure you keep your promise.
Step 2: Get your brand right. Your brand is the message you want to convey – you want to ensure this is consistent across all channels.
Step 3: Get your information systems sorted out. Systems will help you to keep any marketing you do, accountable. This means: ensure you capture the contact details of referrals coming through. Whether you’re a small service company, or a couple of retail stores, you should be building a database.
Step 4: Figure out who your brand ambassadors are. I visited the marketing manager for one of SA’s biggest homegrown companies last week. He told me that they had no advertising budget because they didn’t need one – all their marketing was done through a handful of relationships. Their best work was done around a fire on a Saturday afternoon. All they needed to do was keep these guys happy, the key conduits to their end market, and the job was done.
Step 5: Review the first four steps, and decide whether advertising is necessary. Besides advertising, your channels also include PR, web marketing (of course!), direct mail, events, networking and telesales. Weigh up your options, figure out what suits your target market (and your budget) then make your decision.
In the meantime, check out this link for how NOT to do advertising.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Ideate - Small Business in South Africa
Feb 8th, 2008
[...] Fred wrote about whether small businesses should be advertising (read his pearls here). Here’s a story of a big business that did something similar: In February 2003, Amazon.com [...]
Tristan
Feb 9th, 2008
Hi Fred, interesting thoughts. I think businesses online tend to neglect the branding aspect of their marketing strategies. Advertising and other ‘communication tools’ are used to affect a users brand awareness, attitude and perception. Without figuring out what your brand is or as you rightly say, what your message is, advertising will be ineffectual.
Similarly, when you can identify which experiences and impressions have the most influence for a user, you can learn how to align the brand and its associated message. The difficulty comes in applying that message consistently
ps. This is an excellent read:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/20-bln-reasons-to-get-advertisement-right/