The Cheapest Way to Market Your Business


advertising, marketing, strategies, business, effective

As a business owner you are always looking for most exposure for the least amount of money and why shouldn’t you especially since the economy is experiencing a recession. As a general rule of thumb, in the advertising world the longer your business logo, idea or product can stay in front of your potential customer, the better. This is the very reason why I created a blog and produce YouTube videos so I can keep my name in front of my audience for as long as possible so they would fall in love with my material and want to hire me to speak at their next event.

The Problem With Traditional Advertising

The problem with advertising on the radio and television is that you only get about 30 seconds of exposure to which you have to pay hundreds of dollars. Then even though you have spent lots of money think about what are most people doing during commercials? They are flipping the channel, going into the kitchen to get something to eat, using the bathroom or I sometimes put the television on mute and read a book through the commercials. The long and the short of it is that your intended audience is not hearing your message and even if they are they are only hearing it for about 30 seconds.

On this blog site 2.2% of the people spend more than an hour reading articles that I have written. Another 2.3% spend between 30-60 minutes and 2% spend between 15-30 minutes reading material. Can you imagine how much that would cost me if I wanted that type of exposure on the radio or television? All right so what is the cheapest way to market your business?  The answer comes in the form of 4 simple steps:

  1. Know your Demographic – Do not waste money advertising until you know to whom you are advertising. Logically think about the age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and location of the individuals who will be purchasing your product or who have been purchasing your product. Once your demographic is realized ask yourself where these individuals hang out and then advertise in those venues.
  2. Track your Progress – Do not advertise until you have a plan in place to see if your marketing is working. If you purchase a billboard say, “Mention this ad and save 10%.” Then track how many people call in and mention the ad. Or simply ask all of you customers, “How did you hear about us?” And then track where your traffic is coming from.
  3. Piggyback your Competition – Find out what your competition is doing successfully and then copy their strategies, improve them and customize them to fit your business model. There is no sense in reinventing the wheel especially when money is involved. The businesses that have been around the longest know what it takes to make it in the industry so find out what they are doing and then do it better.
  4. Trade Out – The bartering system is alive and well in today’s economy. You have a great product or service so why not leverage that service in order to get free or deeply discounted advertising for your business? There is not a business service out there that cannot be leverage or traded out.

By leveraging your company’s product or service to reduce your advertising costs and then tracking what is actually working you will drastically reduce your marketing expenses and maximize the traffic that is coming into your business.

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Related posts:

  1. How to Advertise Your Small Business
  2. How to Market Your Business In the Mist of Running One
  3. Is Internet Marketing Worth Your Time or Money?
  4. How to Market Your Business Online
  5. Double Your Advertising Exposure For a Tenth of the Price



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Read more articles on Marketing Strategies. This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 9:22 pm

9 Responses to “The Cheapest Way to Market Your Business”

  1. Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..

    Matt Hanson

  2. Hello. I was reading someone elses blog and saw you on their blogroll. Would you be interested in exchanging blog roll links? If so, feel free to email me.

    Thanks.

  3. [...] StevenRoddy.com – Motivation – Profit & Purpose placed an interesting blog post on The Cheapest Way to Market Your BusinessHere’s a brief overviewAs a business owner you are always looking for most exposure for the least amount of money and why shouldn’t you especially since the economy is experiencing a recession. As a general rule of thumb, in the advertising world the longer your business logo, idea or product can stay in front of your potential customer, [...] [...]

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  5. Thanks for the info,Steven!

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