The old adage that it takes money to make money is an overstatement when it comes to advertising and PR for your business. With patience, creativity, and strategy, the clever business owner can greatly increase their market share with minimal cost.
The first thing to do is to determine your target audience. Aim your efforts at the people who use your product or service. If you sell motorcycles, you would probably want to avoid marketing to grade school children and their mothers for instance.
Specificity is helpful when you are determining your target audience. Suppose you own a children’s toy store. You will want to start with the most obvious component of your audience children.
Once you have narrowed down to your overall target audience, try to narrow further still. If you have a women’s shoe store, do you sell dress shoes or athletic shoes, or both? Do you specialize in a subgroup of your wider audience? If so, be sure to concentrate your efforts in reaching this subgroup.
Now: where do your customers go to purchase from you? Do you make sales online or in person? Do you have one location in a specific neighborhood, or a chain of stores across the state? Knowing where your customers will be purchasing from you is also important information for helping you to determine where to market your product.
A business owner who casts too wide of a marketing net is wasting revenue. Advertising women’s athletic clothing in a local running magazine is good marketing sense; advertising women’s bridal gowns in this same magazine is likely a waste of advertising dollars. Not because women who run can’t also be planning a wedding, but because those same advertising dollars would be much better spent for ad space in a bridal publication.
Simple exposure is not enough. You need to convince a potential customer to come to your store, before they can become a customer. If you include a coupon or special offer in your advertising, this helps to encourage a potential customer to come check out your goods and services. Even a simple black-and-white coupon is sufficient for this purpose.
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