Financing Small Business Advertising Campaigns
Spreading the word about your small business is difficult for a number of reasons. To begin with, owning and running a startup accounts for about 20 hours of your time each day. Another problem is finding available funds that you can put towards advertising. You can’t very well use the money you had put aside for inventory to instead cover the cost of a billboard. Marketing can’t be overlooked, so it’s worth considering borrowing the necessary cash to make sure you can get your company’s name out there. If you can come up with a calculated strategy, money spent on advertisement can lead to a big increase in revenue.
Find Your Market
First and foremost, you need to understand your audience. If you want to market cookware to stay-at-home parents, you shouldn’t buy a bunch of ad space on bus stop benches. Think about the different places a small business can advertise, such as magazines, local radio and online ad space. Once you narrow down the top three or four places where you think your potential clients are most likely to engage, you can start to figure out what it would actually cost you to launch a marketing campaign. If you crunch the numbers and it still seems like too costly a venture, scale back and think of what could make more sense.
Borrowing Options
There are more loan possibilities than you can shake a stick at, and it’s very important to get the right financing terms when you’re paying for marketing. If you’re just planning to promote your brand through one source to one specific demographic, you may only need a short-term loan that you can pay back relatively quickly. Alternatively, if you’re looking to employ a multi-tiered strategy that will slowly work to build up your name recognition, you may need more money and a longer repayment period. It’s important to have this all planned out ahead of time so you don’t take out multiple loans for multiple failed campaigns.
Small business loans might be the best way to get the needed capital for your marketing, as long as you can present a sound strategy for reimbursing the lender. You’ll need to provide the bank or loan officer with documentation proving that your business is profitable and a little advertising will increase those profits. Marketing is an important part of running a successful business, and if you put the appropriate amount of thought into creating a campaign that will reach the right people, you’ll likely benefit from it.
