When to advertise and when not to

There’s nothing quite like starting off with a tough question but the answer to this one is, “it depends”, because advertising CAN help your small business, except when it’s not the right answer.

We see customers wasting a lot of money on advertising before optimising their website. 

This is a problem because advertising is just paying for visitors, and if your problem isn’t GETTING visitors but CONVERTING visitor, then just having more people come to your website is not going to help you.

At best, this is a waste of money, at worst you are even potentially paying for people to dislike your brand.

This is why we place advertising at the end of our Digital Marketing Formula (Steve references this in the article, 3 Insights And A Diagram). Unless you have your strategy and content thought through, and your key communication channels in place, advertising is not going to reward you.

And one of the first things we’ll discuss with you when you contact us to help you with your small business marketing is, do you have content on your website and available to your newsletter subscribers that answers customers’ questions?

Good content starts there. And it’s expanded upon in this article: Is Your Website A Dog’s Breakfast?

With that sorted, along with a clear understanding of who is going to want and/or need your products and services, then we can turn to advertising channels to raise awareness and draw people into your offer.