One of the most challenging aspects of doing business is getting noticed. The challenge is exaggerated if you are a small business with a limited marketing budget.
So how do you go about advertising like the big fish? The very first thing you need to do is to think tactically. Think about all the ways you could possibly advertise your online business; organic search, paid inclusion, pay-per-click / local search, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, email marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, affiliate marketing.
Oh yea, there are tons of ways to advertise and market your products. But you should pick just 3. Let’s say you are an online catering business. Now pick 3 advertising and marketing vehicles from the above list that you can use to maximize your budget. Let’s choose; paid inclusion; pay-per-click / local search and word-of-mouth.
Paid Inclusion
Paid inclusion is a good, easy and quick way to get your online business indexed by major search engines. There are many companies out there who will (for a fee) submit your website to multiple search engines. I like to go directly to the source. For example; you can here submit your website to Yahoo! If you are going to use a multiple inclusion service, I recommend ineedhits.com. They are quick, easy to use and very affordable. Keep in mind that it is possible to often submit your website for free to various search engines. However, it is my experience that if you submit a site for free, it takes longer to show up (only if the search engine has a paid inclusion program). Why, simply because they want you to pay to get your website included in their index quicker.
Pay-Per-Click / Local Search
Pay-per-click or local search (if you are a brick and mortal business) are extremely affordable ways to drive qualified traffic to your website. Often for just pennies you can receive good leads. The number one PPC / local search network is Google. But it can also be the most expensive. Why? Because tons of advertisers are using it, therefore you will be bidding against a boat load of competitors and you can get slammed with loads of traffic if you are not careful. If you are looking to drive a fair amount of traffic to your business and want to be able to advertise a little bit on each of the major networks, without focusing too much on one (unless it is paying off for you), I recommend ReachLocal. It is affordable, has a great user interface and best of all you work with a local agent that will see to it that your hard earned revenue is spent well.
Word-of-Mouth
Word-of-mouth marketing is in my opinion the number one most effective way to advertise and market your business. It doesn’t yield the tons of traffic that you can get from other forms of online advertising, but, it has a very high conversion rate. Why? Because more often than not, when someone goes to your website due to WOM, it is because someone they know recommended you. You can not get a better qualified lead than that. For effective ways on how to use WOM, you can visit the Word of Mouth Marketing Association at http://www.womma.org/.
