Choosing the Right Advertising Medium for Your Small Business

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Choosing the Right Advertising Medium for Your Small Business

For a small business, every dollar is precious. Small businesses do not advertise for the sake of advertising. Instead, they want to get the most return for their investment. Learn the advantages and disadvantages of each advertising medium that you can use to provide your business the winning edge.

by Lyve Alexis Pleshette

PowerHomebiz.com Staff Writer

If you are ready to get the word out about your business, one of the steps that you need to do is to select the right media where you will advertise and promote your business.

For a small business, every dollar is precious. Small businesses do not advertise for the sake of advertising. Instead, they want to get the most return for their investment. Your advertising campaign should translate to greater sales, more profits and healthier bottom line.

While there are a number of venues where you can promote your business, you need to ask three important questions:

Where are my target buyers?

What is the best medium to reach them?

Can I afford to launch an effective campaign using this medium?

An important step to developing your sales and marketing plan is to select the right media to send out your message. There are no hard-and-fast rules as to which media is better. The right media for one business may be wrong for another.

Based on an excellent small business reference book "How to Start and Operate a Successful Small Business: Winning the Entrepreneurial Game" by David E. Rye, as well as contributions from our staffers, below are the relative advantages and disadvantages of the advertising media most frequently used by small businesses:

Newspapers. Newspapers are one of the traditional mediums used by businesses, both big and small alike, to advertise their businesses.

Advantages

Allows you to reach a huge number of people in a given geographic area

You have the flexibility in deciding the ad size and placement within the newspaper

Your ad can be as large as necessary to communicate as much of a story as you care to tell

Exposure to your ad is not limited; readers can go back to your message again and again if so desired.

Free help in creating and producing ad copy is usually available

Quick turn-around helps your ad reflect the changing market conditions. The ad you decide to run today can be in your customers' hands in one to two days.

Disadvantages

Ad space can be expensive

Your ad has to compete against the clutter of other advertisers, including the giants ads run by supermarkets and department stores as well as the ads of your competitors

Poor photo reproduction limits creativity

Newspapers