What "medium" should you be using to market your business?

The third key to marketing your small business is “medium”. This key is all about how to get people in the door. Advertising mediums don’t have to be just newspaper, TV or radio ads; they could be billboards (except not in VT), online banner ads, having a float in the Burlington Mardi Gras Parade or sending text messages to a list of phone numbers.  The important thing to think about is which advertising medium best fits your target market. By having read my earlier post “The Importance of ‘market’ for small business owners” you should already have a target market profile in place. From that you can start to infer where your target market is. Do they watch WCAX in Vermont, do they read the NY Times Online, would they attend the Mardi Gras Parade? If you answer yes to any of these questions, than maybe your ads should be there.

The goal of an advertisement is to intercept a potential customer’s intent to buy with your product or service. For example, someone redoing a kitchen will have a need for new paint. The challenge for Sherwin-Williams is to intercept the homeowner with messages about their brand of paint during this buying process. While newspaper or TV ads could help build general awareness of Sherwin-Williams another approach could be to get interior designers to specify specific Sherwin-Williams paint. Additionally, Sherwin-Williams to place ads on “how to”blogs that cater to learning how to paint.

One very effective way to get someone to buy your product is Word of Mouth. This can be evident when a friend recommends a new restaurant they just discovered and rave about their gourmet burgers. Not only are you more likely to visit the restaurant, but you will probably try one of the burgers on the menu. While word of mouth might be effective, it isn’t necessarily easy to create, but there are ways to spur on the process. Programs such as loyalty cards, refer a friend incentive or email campaigns with original content that customers would want to share with friends are all possibilities.

The final step in ensuring the chosen advertising medium is successful is to establish a few metrics to track the success of the campaign. One of the most rudimentary is to track changes in sales volume over the length of the campaign, while not very accurate, it is at least a start. Other simple ways could be to track traffic to your Web site or simple ask your customers how they heard about your company. Tracking campaigns is a huge area of study in and of itself and there will be more on this topic in later posts. However, the important take away is to design a campaign in such a way that the success of it can be tracked and thus comparied to future campaigns.