Guide 15 min read
1. What is advertising?
Advertising is ‘paid for’ marketing activity that gets your products and services in front of your audience to raise awareness, create demand, and boost sales.
The main purpose of advertising is to target your audience with persuasive messaging in the right place at the right time to influence their purchase decisions now, or in the future.
2. The benefits of advertising for small businesses
Advertising can be an important part of the marketing mix for small businesses. As with any type of marketing, it’s important to understand the costs and benefits of advertising, so you can decide how best to use it. Some of the benefits of advertising for small businesses include:
● Raising awareness. Running ads can help increase the visibility of your small business by getting you in front of your target market, making your potential customers aware of your products or services and the benefits they bring, to help keep your business front of mind.
● Reaching new customers. Targeted advertising helps you get your messaging in front of new potential customers - for example if you’re expanding into a new location or demographic.
● Creating demand. If your product or service is an innovative new solution to a problem with no direct competitors, advertising can help you create demand for it (i.e. by telling people that this solution now exists and why it will benefit them).
● Building your brand. Well-crafted ads help to build and reinforce your ‘brand identity’ so your target audience will recognise your brand in future.
● Gaining new customers. Well-targeted ads can reach and influence your target audience to help persuade them to buy from you instead of competitors.
3. The role of advertising
Advertising’s job is to create demand, raise awareness, spark interest, and persuade people to buy.
For advertising to be successful, it must be well-targeted - that is, it must be seen by the right people (your target audience), in the right place (in the channel that best suits your needs), at the right time (when they will be most receptive to your messaging).
In order to work out when is the ‘right time’, it’s important to understand the different stages of the customer decision process. This is the process that a customer goes through when deciding to purchase a product or service.
It sounds complicated but really, it just helps you decide where in the process you need to advertise to them, and what messaging and advertising channel will be most effective at that point.
● Awareness:
○ Customer develops a need - they are aware that they have a problem that needs fixed.
○ The aim of advertising is to reach your target audience and grab their attention to help create the demand (by highlighting the need) and raise awareness that your product or service exists and meets their need.
● Interest:
○ Customer seeks information - they look at options for how their problem can be fixed.
○ Advertising should generate interest in your product or service and position it as a credible solution e.g. by explaining the benefits offered by key features.
● Desire:
○ Customer evaluates their options and considers which solution is best for them.
○ Advertising’s job is to spark desire and persuade them to purchase your offering e.g by consolidating your unique selling points (USPs) and building an emotional connection and trust in your brand.
● Action:
○ Customer makes their purchase decision and is ready to buy.
○ Advertising should provide a strong call to action and drive prospects to your website or sales process to facilitate the sale. It can also be used to retarget customers who fell out of the funnel before buying (adhering to GDPR).
● Retention:
○ Customer considers whether they are satisfied with your offering after purchase.
○ The main job here is to retain the customer. Advertising can be used to help with this by retargeting with personalised offers, content, and new features or benefits (adhering to GDPR).
4. Set your objectives
You must set goals and objectives for your advertising for it to be effective and prevent budget being wasted.
Why are you doing advertising?
Begin by considering the purpose of your advertising - WHY are you doing this? What do you hope to achieve? This will help you keep your advertising activity focused on your business goals.
Start with, writing down some need statements, relating to the specific challenges you face, that begins with “we need to use advertising to….”. For example:
“We need to use advertising to….”
● raise awareness of our business, service or product
● let people know that our innovative new product exists
● find and generate new leads from potential customers
● make more direct sales
● drive sales in the short term
● persuade customers to use our service/product over other options
● drive more feet through the door of our physical premises
● encourage previous customers to buy again.
Set S.M.A.R.T objectives
Once you’ve laid out the purposes of your advertising, you can decide on your advertising objectives, and how best to measure your results so it is easier to track your return on investment (ROI).
There is a simple, easy to remember outline that has held true for years, and that is the S.M.A.R.T framework. Creating S.M.A.R.T objectives keeps them focused and achievable. Any objective must be:
● Specific. It must pinpoint exactly what needs to be achieved.
● Measurable. It must be possible to measure this objective and it needs to contain specific metrics.
● Actionable. You must be able to act on the objective and realistically achieve it.
● Relevant. The objective must be relevant to what you’re trying to achieve and to the overarching business goal.
● Time-driven. It must detail when the objective needs to be achieved by, and must be able to be measured against different time periods.
So for example, if your purpose is “to let wild swimmers know that our product exists and create demand for one”, one of your SMART objectives could be:
“Increase monthly sales of slimline wetsuits by 25% within the next 6 months by driving 2,000 visits per month to the website while maintaining a conversion rate of 3%.”
5. Define your audience
To run an effective advertising campaign, you must understand your audience - defining who they are and what they want. This helps you to target your ads, selecting the most appropriate advertising channels and creating the messaging that will most appeal to your audience.
Create audience personas
A good way to achieve this is to create personas, also known as pen portraits, of your audience.
Personas contain specific information about a fictional ‘customer’ that represents one of your key target audience groups. You may have a few different ‘groups’ within your target audience.
They allow you to view your business and your advertising from your customers’ perspective, so your ads will effectively target each group of your audience and appeal to them. Write down what you can about your ideal customers by thinking about who they are and what they do. For example, you could consider some of the following:
● Who are they?
○ How old are they and what is their gender?
○ Where do they live? Are they local, or in a specific region or area?
○ What is their job and income bracket?
○ What kind of house do they live in?
○ Are they married, single, young kids, old kids, etc?
○ Do they share certain hobbies or interests (wild swimming, knitting, cycling, gastro travel, food and cooking, eating out, etc)?
○ What issues and causes do they care about? (politics, poverty, sustainability, nutrition, family, etc)
● How do they interact with media?
○ What other brands do they like? Who do they follow online?
○ How do they shop (online/offline)?
○ How do they read news (online/offline)?
○ Which news sites would they visit and what newspapers and magazines do they read?
○ Which websites would they visit? Which social platforms are they on?
● What do they want from you?
○ What do they aim to achieve by using your product or service?
○ What problems or do they have which your product or service solves?
○ What would be their objections to you? What reasons do they have not to buy your product or service?
○ When do they consume/use your product or service?
○ How often do they consume/use your product or service?
○ What competitors do they choose for this product or service?
○ Why do they use these competitors?
● What do you have that they want?
○ What are your USPs (unique selling points)? What is it about your products and services that is special and useful to them? What are the benefits to them?
○ What do you do best? What do you receive good feedback on from existing customers? Why do they choose you?
○ Why should your audience choose you? What sets you apart from competitors?
● What messaging will be most persuasive to them?
○ What are the ‘mandatories’? What does your business have to have in order to persuade them and get over their objections? (e.g. you must have a range of colours and sizes available, must be of a certain quality, etc)
○ What will convince them to consider you and to buy? How can you make the benefits clear to them and sell your solution to their problem?
Carry out some audience research
If you can back up your personas with some research (like demographic data and trends, interviews with your target audience, or surveys) then great. Some ideas for research you can carry out yourself include:
● Speak to people you know who fit the bill or to your regular customers. Find out their favourite brands, websites, interests, types and formats of content, etc.
● Look at Business Gateway market reports for your industry.
● Have a look online for some data on trends within your audience groups (see our article on tools and techniques to identify customer trends for more information).
6. Take inspiration
Have a look at what your competitors do to advertise their products or services. Read our tips for easy competitor research to get started.
Also take inspiration from other businesses - what do the market leaders in your industry do to advertise? Looking further afield, look at what other small companies outwith your industry do to advertise to their audiences. For example if you’re a plumber, you could take inspiration from how other tradespeople position and advertise their businesses.
It can be useful to gain inspiration from what other businesses do, however remember competitor research is for insight only. Never just copy a competitor’s approach or content.
7. Tips and techniques
Ensure all ads:
● are targeted to your audience - work with your personas and think about who you are talking to and what they want to hear from you
● contain clear messaging - keep your ad messaging clear for your users and spell out the benefits to keep your messaging in line with your objectives
● have a clear call to action - tell your audience what to do next (e.g. call for a quote, come to the shop, go to our website, buy online, find in-store, etc)
● are creatively strong - you want your ads to grab attention, so they must look eye-catching and professional. Use tools like Canva to design ads yourself or seek the services of a designer if you need more help.
Once you understand the basics of advertising, you can start planning which advertising channels could be the best fit for your business.