When you’re a large business, you hire an advertising team. Your team can be made up of in-house marketing experts who’ve been to marketing school and have all the appropriate degrees as well as an outside independent advertising firm with all the bells and whistles to go along. You literally can hand off your whole marketing and advertising package to professionals the way a quarterback hands the ball off to a running back. You just let them take it and run with it. When you’re a small business, you don’t have the luxury of a whole team of professionals behind you. That means you’ve got to run that ball into the end zone yourself. It can be pretty overwhelming, but there are resources at your disposal if you know where to look.
Pay-Per-Click
One resource at your fingertips is Google Adwords. If you’re new to self-promotion, you may not know what this program is. Essentially, it’s a way of advertising that’s called pay-per-click. You pay Google – or the company you choose to host your ad campaign – each time your business pops up in their search engine and a consumer clicks on you. One item to list in the ‘pro’ column of your decision-making matrix is that Google Adwords uses two different ways of looking for customers for you.
The first is rather intuitive. It’s their search network. Someone types in the search bar a few words that have to do with your business and you come up near the top of their search results. Because you’ve paid for their pay-per-click advertising service, you’re guaranteed a spot near the top of the list. These ads are text-based. The other way they market you is through banner ads. While you may not think this will make a difference, banner ads generate more traffic than you think. Some people are more visual and need to see your product before they’ll investigate you further. Others have been to see you before, but need to be reminded you’re still there for them.
Let the Business Beware
One thing of which you need to take care is how you market yourself. It’s tempting to put a bunch of common search engine buzzwords on your site so you get a lot of traffic from people searching. Don’t do that. Stick to being honest about yourself on your site and attracting the customers who actually need or want you. The consequences of false advertising can be dire. You could be deliberately relegated to the bottom of search results or you could be de-listed entirely from the search engine.
You have great options available to you as small business marketing assistance.