How to advertise your business cost-effectively

You should love advertising if you want your business to be successful.

Many small business owners and managers tend to be skeptical about the effectiveness of advertising primarily because of cost. They are usually too busy trying to ensure the survival of their business by reducing costs to realise that what a business needs to survive is revenue, lots of it and the only way to generate revenue is to make sales and the best tool that helps to boost sales for a business to match its costs (break-even) and then move on to profitability is advertising.

Advertising is any presentation that is made by a business in order to convince members of the public to buy its products or services. It is a part of marketing but it is not the same because marketing entails delivering value to your customers profitably; advertising is a tool to convince people to become your customers. 

The reluctance of many small business owners and managers to invest in advertising is very understandable; they do not want to lose money even if they are not making enough of it. This approach may ensure the short-term survival of their business but it is likely to lead to its failure long term.  What business managers need to look out for is cost-effective advertising that brings the best return on investment (ROI). So, instead of deciding not to invest much in advertising, you should seek to invest in the most cost-effective advertising that delivers the best returns for you in terms of product awareness, interest generation and actual purchases from your target market. 

Cost-effective advertising can be achieved by considering your finances, the nature of your products or services and what your target market is. Once, you study your business and its external environment to properly define these factors, you would then have to research to find the best advertising medium that would enable you achieve your advertising objective which ideally should be: “generating the most sales at the lowest cost”. There is no one-size-fits-all perfect advertising medium for all businesses. Each business is unique and as such has its own peculiarities. Hence, it is up to each manager to determine what the best advertising medium or mix (selection of advertising media) is for his business.

A great way to fine-tune your skills when it comes to advertising is to try out your ideas using media that allow you to advertise for free. Hareewo.com is one of such and it provides you with an opportunity to create a really good sales page online for your business which you can share on social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, BBM, WeChat and lots more.

There are also many free classifieds websites that you can use with OLX being the most popular one in Nigeria.

Someone once said: “doing a business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark; no one knows what you are doing except you.” Give your business an added impetus today by being more active as an advertiser.