When trying to attract more clients to your business, it is important to be realistic about how much time and money will be involved in building, advertising, and promoting your services to potential new customers. Knowing what this involves before you begin will help you to prepare adequately.
When deciding on how you are going to proceed with building your client base, you will need to make several decisions. Below, we will examine some of the decisions you will need to make and the considerations to take into account when making them.
What Type of Advertising Should You Begin With?
There are various ways to advertise a business, and the first decision you make should be which way to do this. Are you planning to advertise online, offline, or both? When considering which method of advertising you wish to use, you will need to choose between several options.
If you are planning to advertise online, you have several options available. You may choose from a variety of SEO techniques, including backlinks, embedded advertisements, or many other options.
SEO techniques can be used for a company or individual and can be instrumental in increasing the number of clients you have. SEO is also used to optimize a company website or individual profile.
You may instead choose an online option, such as a mail drop, with an email flyer, offer, or information sent to all clients or potential clients for whom you have an email address. Mail drops are the reason gathering contact information for clients is important.
Alternatively, you could choose to use physical advertising such as billboards, flyers, posters, or letters. You could interact directly with potential clients by approaching people or companies who would be interested in your services and highlighting what you can do for them.
Finally, you may choose to encourage word-of-mouth advertising. Encouraging satisfied clients to recommend your services to others in exchange for a reduction in price or gift voucher.
Whichever method of advertising you choose to use, it is important that you budget for the cost. In addition to the cost of advertising, you will also need to know how long it will take you to run the advertising campaign.
Hire a Professional or Do It Yourself?
After deciding the type of advertising campaign you are going to run, the next decision to make is who is going to run that campaign for you. You should have made a plan for how much time will be spent on advertising, and you will need to decide if this is an acceptable amount of time while running your business.
You can then decide whether you will complete the advertising campaigns yourself, hire someone to work within your company in a marketing position, or will you hire a third-party company to advertise for you. Each will have its own benefits and risks, which we explore below.
You may choose to hire a company that will work on your business’s online presence. With a professional company, you can be sure that they will have a tried and tested strategy for the type of business you have.
You will be able to sit down with a representative of the company you hire and outline your expectations and aims for the future of your business. A professional company will take away the stress of advertising from you and your business, giving you the time to focus on clients.
However, there will be costs associated with hiring a company to run advertising campaigns for you. It is often possible to establish the costs of a company completing the work in advance using the price plans on their website. If the price plans available do not suit your needs, you can create a bespoke SEO plan.
If you know you will not have time to run the advertising campaigns and run the business yourself, an alternative is to hire a member of staff to do the advertising for you. This option gives you a lot of control over what the role is going to be and how each campaign will run.
However, this is also the most expensive option available if you hire someone to work for your company year-round, as you will have an additional salary to pay. Alternatively, you can contract someone to work per campaign and save some money.
This option, similar to a third-party company, enables you to be confident in the work being done as you will know the experience level of the person you are hiring.
Your final option is to run all advertising and SEO yourself. This is by far the cheapest option for the additional budget needed to complete this work. However, it is the most time-consuming thing for you.
If you are starting up a small business, you may not have the budget to hire someone into the company or a third party to run advertising campaigns for you. So, running the campaigns yourself might be the only financially viable option for you, regardless of the time commitment.
Regardless of your level of experience in advertising and SEO, there is a wealth of information available online. You can search for which type of advertising suits the type of company you have, or you can perform a search such as law firm SEO Gerrid Smith to see examples of effective SEO for individuals.
Choose What is Right for You
The most important thing to do when advertising any company or service is to do what is right for you. Do not overspend on your budget to advertise if you are not guaranteed to get extra work, as you will run at a loss.
It is often beneficial to combine several types of advertising to reach the highest number of potential new clients. You could, therefore, utilize a range of techniques that you have identified as having the highest likelihood of success.
Whichever you choose, we recommend adding a review period to ensure that what you are doing is effective. If it is not, then you should change your choices until you find the best way to bring in more business.