Business Marketing and Advertising

Advertising is an effective way of promoting your products and services to your target audience and is usually a paid form of promotion.Understanding the wide range of advertising strategies available will allow you to use the one that is best for your business.

Good advertising should:

• Advertising build the image of your business
• explain the benefits of your products and services
• increase awareness of new products and services before, when and after they are launched
• generate interest from your target market, as well as a new audience of prospective customers
• encourage customers to ask for information about your business and provide options for how they can contact you
• increase the demand from customers and increase your sales.

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is the marketing statement you use to sell your products and services to prospective customers.

How to develop your USP

To develop your USP, you need to focus on your business. Consider:

• What do I do that no one else does?
• What is unique about my business?
• What is my unique story? (e.g. product selection, service standards, staff training)
• How can this be made different from my competitors?

Then consider your customers:

• What does the customer want?
• What need or want are they really trying to satisfy?
• What is the main reason my customers buy from me?
• What can I do to match or exceed those expectations?
• What can I do to make sure the customer gets what they want?

Services or Selling, Customers Need Fastest delivery at affordable prices.

Assess the results

There are many simple ways that you can assess which types of advertising generate the best results for your business. You can:

• ask your customers how they found out about your business
• motivate customers to mention/bring in an advertisement for a discount
• use a separate phone number or email address for specific advertisements to track the response
• monitor the enquiries from customers just after a new advertisement is published - for example, you might advertise a new product on the radio on Friday and find that you have an increase in customers the next day
• capture customer postcode information to determine the best locations for advertising.