Market With Ingenuity When Advertising Budgets Are Tight

Building your small business’s customer base takes time and marketing, more marketing if shortening the ramp-up time is important. However, when advertising budgets are tight, how you market your business takes on greater importance.

The time you spend planning your marketing strategy will pay-off in its effectiveness. When budgets are tight, but sales are steady, US Business Finance Corp may be able to help you with a business cash advance to increase advertising and increase sales. The following are tips small businesses follow to boost sales and make the most of their marketing investment.

1. Know your customer. Instead of a “shotgun” marketing approach, where advertising goes out to a large general market, tailor your marketing to a very defined demographic. With a clear target you can measure your marketing effectiveness and tighten the scope of where and how you place your advertising material.
2. Network within your industry. Referrals are a solid source of business leads since anyone sent to your store or requesting your services has most likely heard a positive testimonial about you. The best people to network with are those who have businesses that share the same market, but sell different or complementary products or services. Leads groups and community service groups are all fallow ground for networking.
3. Understand your market. What local publications do they read? What radio stations do they listen to? Is there a favorite restaurant at which they congregate? Knowing as much about your target market makes it possible for you to better spend your advertising budget?
4. Get marketing feedback – find out how your customers found you. Knowing how your customers found you is the most important information you can receive. With that feedback you can refine your marketing. If one type of marketing does not work, the sooner you know, the less money you send down the wrong rabbit run.
5. Present your business as a benefit or solution for the potential customer. Turn the marketing tendency of listing your services or products features into benefits your customer receives. Listing features translates into “You’re selling something”. Listing benefits translates into “I can receive something I need”. For example, if you are an insurance agent brand yourself as “I help people get prepared financially for those unfortunate things that happen unexpectedly.” Marketing really about creating perceptions – you can either sell insurance or help someone make sure their family is taken care of should something happen to them. The first is perceived as an expense, the second as an investment.
6. Look for local market exposure. Find opportunities where you can use your products or services to support a cause or a raffle at wholesale prices. Put your name up alongside a worthy cause – always good publicity – and you usually invest less marketing dollars than the public’s perceived value of your offering. For instance, if you are an advertising agency, co-sponsoring an event, especially with businesses you want to network with, and placing ads at your wholesale discount prices costs you less than the event sponsors would have to pay if hiring your company – and you get your name prominently linked to an image-boosting event.

Using your readily available assets – customer feedback, networking referrals and “wholesale access” to your company’s strengths – to leverage your marketing capacity saves advertising dollars and maximizes your marketing effectiveness. Call US Business Finance Corp to get your business a business cash advance to invest in your advertising and future growth.

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Filed under: Business Cash Advance, Marketing and Sales, Money Matters - Business, Your New Business