Every day new business ventures spring up based on the zeal and passion of the business owner. He has seen a need and believes he has all it takes to make it work. Yes, he is thinking of conquering the world with that excellent idea.
One thing every business must have to face and conquer is how to bring their products and services before those who need them. Businesses strive to know how to reach their prospective customers. Striving to reach customers with the right message, at the right time, for the right price, and through the right medium.
For start-ups, there are always a million and one things to do. You are faced with recurring and rising expenditures. And you know sales is the only thing that can increase your profit margin. You understand then that to make sales you must make the clients. You, however, know that to make clients, you must meet them and earn their trust.
The thing is this; the market does not care whether you are big or small. And that means you just might have to slug it out with those big businesses or blue-chip companies who might be rendering the same or similar services as you. The advantage for you now is that the market sometimes does not care whether you are big or small.
Just know how to reach the customer with the right goods or service, at the right price and delivery options, and it’s a deal!
The big businesses, on the other hand, have huge funds at their disposal. They can afford all the razzmatazz in advertising; billboards, TV, radio, and more. But you are a small start-up and must deliberately keep your cost far below your sales price in order to make a profit and survive.
But! You must compete in the same market as the big boys! So what do you do? Now the way to go is to think smart; think outside the box, and you just might become the next big name in your industry with time!
In an ever-evolving world like ours, there are many openings small businesses can take advantage of in order to survive. And the internet is replete with so many of them. One of such is the pay-per-click (PPC) system.
PPC is one way to level the gap in advertising between big and small companies. Seat as I take you through the cheapest means for advertising. Means to get your products and services into the customer’s lap without a huge hole in your pocket.
Cheap advertising sources
Bing Ads
Bing Ads is quite an interesting marketing and advertising tool. It provides ample opportunity for small businesses to garner a huge client base. It was initially known as Microsoft Adcenter and MSN Adcenter. It is a Microsoft search engine built on Bing, allowing for pay-per-click advertising. Small and medium-scale businesses can take advantage of this avenue to promote their services.
The Pay Per Click PPC system allows businesses to pay for what they can afford based on their budget. Bing allows clients to search the web for useful content, videos, images, map services that small businesses can take advantage of to be noticed. One thing that stands Bing out is that it controls 1/3rd of the web search engines.
Google AdWords
There is no gainsaying that Google is the number one search engine in the world. Google controls two-thirds of the keyword searches on the web. For a small business, using Google AdWords, therefore, increases the chances of being seen by millions of people daily. One other valuable thing about Google Ads is that it allows you to work based on your budget.
With Google Ads, you can target your search to a particular demographic as well as a specific area of interest. You only pay based on the number of clicks recorded. The keyword search on Google determines how visible your searches would be and how much traffic it would generate.
However, you should know you can sign up for a free account on Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local. You fill their forms and get listed. So when someone searches for businesses providing such services in your area, yours should come up too.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is about one of the biggest things in social networking. Though Facebook is not a search engine but gives you direct contact with prospective clients. With Facebook Ads, you can target your audience and narrow it down to locality and other more specific demographic issues to generate better clicks or views.
Yahoo
Yahoo Ads provides small businesses with an opportunity for higher conversion rates. This is because of its native advertising style where they insert the ads inside relevant content in a box. Thus, ads are seen quickly and responded to.
Yelp Ads
Yelp Ads are quite impressive not only because they can be targeted but because they provide room for reviews and sharing of your product reviews. Yelp Ads are usually on other competitors’ pages and top of web searches.
LinkedIn Ads
This works perfectly for small businesses as you can better target particular areas and use demographics to reach a target audience. You can target location, demographics, profession, and more, making your search more relevant.
YouTube commercials
You can create an ad for your product or service and post it for free on your Youtube channel. That way you can redirect prospects to your website when they begin to ask for more information.
BuySellAds
BuySellAds offers small businesses an opportunity to incorporate a complete online store set up on their website for a small fee using the Buysell script. One of the many challenges for small businesses is locating the customer and then as the business grows the logistics to meet customer demands.
It carries features relating to details on shipping goods, provides a real-time cost of shipment, terms, and conditions for shipping, and the payment platform. BuySell makes it easy for small businesses to create a market and then customers to buy while the business owner sells with ease.
Write and publish articles
It’s amazing! Do you know you can write interesting articles on topics relevant to your products or services? Yes, develop rich content on your product or services and then upload it to:
- Popular blogs and websites
- Ezine Articles,
- Article Base,
- The Free Library
- Now, each of these sites allows you to add your website link to the articles; that way you generate free traffic to your website.
Though not much is said in this article about these other social network sites they provide very high traffic and conversion rates as well if used properly. They are Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
