Small businesses can’t compete with the big guys by buying promotional spots on television. It’s simply not an affordable strategy for a small business. That doesn’t mean that a small business should forgo advertising all together, instead they should focus on creative advertising funded with spare cash or business loans. First, a business will need to assess their market. Is it regional or multinational? This will affect how they advertise and the strategies they invoke. Next, they will want to understand their demographic customer profile. Finally, they will want to set aside monies for creative advertising, based on their assessment of market and demographics.

Where Is Your Target Market?

Small businesses may not actually have to compete on a world stage, if they are a local business with local customers. Examples of these types of businesses are Mom and Pop stores that cater to a local clientèle found on Main Street. Other types of businesses that seek a local market can be home remodeling industries and local real estate companies. These establishments all have one thing in common: They are tied into the customer base that resides geographically close to them. It’s not important for these types of business to advertise world-wide, as their customer base isn’t there anyways. Instead, they want to focus on advertising that reaches their geographic area, whether it’s one state or a set of states in which they do business.

Who Is Your Customer?

Along with this information, small businesses should also consider who is buying their products, their demographic. If the typical buyer is a female householder within a certain region, ads should be created to appeal to demographic and advertised to reach the target markets. Both of these elements are very important when considering advertising formats. If your market does happen to be world-wide, or at least several different countries, but your demographic is teenagers, then you want to use strategies that reach this market, but narrow it down to traffic from teenagers.

Creative Advertising Techniques

Finally, here are some advertising techniques that can be used to help generate sales, taking into account target market and demographics.

Sign Spinning – This works great for a local business on a major thoroughfare where many people in their sales demographic pass by each day. It is relatively inexpensive when compared to television, radio, or print advertising and can generate a lot of attention from many different types of demographic audiences.

Local Coupon Packets – You can advertise locally with advertising packets that include a number of local merchants with discount offers. In general, these work for a residential homeowner demographic as they need a residential address to mail them out.

Affiliate Marketing – This has a global reach and the audience demographic is targeted by the publisher, not the creator of the ad. Therefore, it is much less highly targeted, and instead relies on a mass exposure to work it’s magic.

Social Network Ads – These are global, also, but you can limit them to specific demographics that are finely tuned to age and other social characteristics that are obtained upon registration. SocialAds on Facebook is one such program that creative business owners can use to get online ads that are highly targeted to their chosen demographic.

Print Ads – These can be limited to the audience of the subscriber base, and so you should choose the publication for its demographic and market reach, not for it’s popularity. A church bulletin, for instance, may work well in cases where you’re selling religious items, and cost far less than advertising in a local newspaper.

Blogs – You can sponsor a blog with a big targeted audience, but their reach may be limited. You will reach a world-wide base, in some cases, but the number of people is limited to how many people read the blog. The rates are also dependent on how popular the blog is with readers. You pay for a link back to your website or ads posted on the blog on a monthly basis.

YouTube Videos – You can also pay to be featured on a YouTube video in the URL as a sponsor, if the video is relevant to your market niche. Videos are very popular with tech-savvy audiences and can be a great way to reach many people, if the video goes viral.

Referrals – Some of the best advertising, both locally and on the Internet, comes from word of mouth. Give out incentives for people to share your services with others by offering a referral bonus. You only pay if you get a new customer and you can build a large number of independent representatives who are promoting your service, both online and offline.