Tips & Strategies for Advertising
a Small Business

To understand why some advertising works and other small business advertising produces no results or response whatsoever, it's important to look at "the big picture":

• Your prospective customers are exposed to a steady stream of advertising messages throughout the day, ever day. When they're driving they see billboard ads, hear radio commercials, pass by promotional signs, and see slogans, logos, and ads on vans, tractor trailers, and banners. At work, they're exposed to dozens, if not hundreds of ads on the Internet. When they get home, they open their mail, read the newspaper, surf the Web, and watch television. There are subjected to constant sales pitches—both blatant and subtle.

  With this constant flurry of advertising and marketing messages being pumped in our direction throughout the day, our brains need to filter most of it out or else we'd be overwhelmed.

  So when you look at the big picture of how many competing messages and sales pitches and offers are flying around every day, it's amazing that anyone's advertising ever works!

  Advertising a small business can work, but it takes more that just having a presence on the Internet, in the local media, or in people's mailboxes. If your offer or message isn't distinctive or compelling or interactive, then it will probably be overlooked or ignored. Advertising a small business effectively requires that you stand out—and not just because you're loud or annoying, but because your offer or business concept or style is distinctive and appealing.

• Small business advertising that just focuses on services or products are typically boring and unremarkable It just blends in with the 'sea of ads' that seem to be in our face throughout the day. For some reason, many small business owners think that just because their business name, phone number, location, and a list of their offerings are publicized, that their phone is going to ring off the hook. Most of the time, it doesn't happen that way because run-of-the-mill ads like that are mentally filtered out by most people.

Here are a few quick tips about how to effectively advertise a small business. For more advertising strategies and small business marketing tips, visit Marketing Survival Kit.com!

1. In your ads and marketing messages, spend less time talking about yourself and more time telling your prospects what's in it for them! If you want to know how to advertise your business effectively, here are some strategies for engaging them: focus your ads on how you can save people money or make money, help them solve a nagging problem, provide a service that will make them happier and more secure, provide them with more convenience, opportunity, or better health.
2. Perhaps the best advice that was ever offered out about how to advertise a business is to "sell the sizzle not the steak!" If you can succeed at planting a pleasant or exciting feeling, expectation, or emotion in people's minds—and cause them to associate your product, service, or business with that positive feeling, you thenhave have succeeding in connecting with your prospects, and getting them interested in doing business with you. That's step one in the process, and is often the most difficult hurdle.
3. Remember that your prospects often need to be exposed to your offer several times before they're ready to become a customer or client.
4. Motivate people to respond to your ads with incentives, such as coupons that expire, bonuses or free gifts that are available "while supplies last", or other reminders that convey the message that he or she who hesitates is lost! Think of ways in which you can incorporate the concepts of scarcity, urgency, or limited availability into your advertising or marketing messages. One of the main goals of advertising a small business is to get prospects to respond to your offer by taking action. Unless you can catch their attention and give them a good reason to call, email, or provide you with contact information, they will procrastinate forever or just get distracted and lose interest.
5. The basis of any effective advertising strategy is knowing what your competitive advantages are and leveraging them every chance you get in your ads, sales letters, commercials, Tweets, slogans, signs, business website, and e-mail marketing.
For more marketing ideas and tools, visit Marketing Survival Kit.com.