Advertising to Your Audience
Running a small business is difficult. As a small business owner, you have a lot to juggle; starting up and maintaining a business involves a lot of time and money. Obviously, you want that time and money to be well spent. How can you assure this happens? Well, you could consider an outside group such as a professional employer organization to handle administrative tasks such as processing payroll, filing payroll taxes, and handling workers’ compensation insurance for your employees. After you free up your time and reduce costs by hiring a PEO, you will begin to wonder how you can increase sales. There are several ways. You could create more products or improve your current services with greater technology. Another solution is to invest in advertising. Or, you could consider your audience.
How exactly do you advertise to your audience? Consider these tips:
Consider your product.
Hopefully your product or service is something that you would want. After all, it is very difficult to sell something that you are not passionate about. Why do you like your product? How you answer this question will determine the content of your advertisement.
Remember to be realistic about what you are selling. While you may think you have the greatest product ever, not everyone will agree with you. If you over-inflate your product and then it fails to live up to that expectation you will end up losing customers. Highlight the benefits of your product or service when you advertise without going overboard.
Consider your demographic as a whole.
If you sell motorcycles you will probably not put an ad in Vogue Knitting© and that is a good thing. While there are possibly those that enjoy both knitting and riding motorcycles they do not consist of a very large group. Look at patterns that define the majority of your group and use those when planning advertising instead of minor similarities. How do you do this? Many companies ask for profiles of their customers. This may be able to help you determine a racial or gender profile for your “average customer” but it can be severely limited. Try conducting a survey of your customers. Randomly select customers (not all of them but a good portion) to fill out your survey and provide a type of reward in order to get responses. Surveys can be expensive and time-consuming (no surprise there) but are much more reliable than polls. Plus, the information that you gain from them will help you determine your target audience.
Include questions about your customer’s personal interests to determine to whom you should advertise and where you should focus on advertising. Do your customers use the computer extensively? Do they read particular types of magazines? A survey can also help determine how you should advertise; in other words, the style of your advertisement. Is your audience more intellectual, wanting to hear about studies you have conducted on your product, or more visual, wanting to see your service in action?
In order to advertise you must do a lot of considering, especially because determining your target audience and how to reach them is key.
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