Top 5 Marketing and Advertising Tips for Your Small Business

By Sandra Rea

Advertising and marketing is something all small businesses need in order to draw attention to their brands. These are five things a small business should do to help them increase brand awareness and ultimately their bottom line.

1. Blogging: Blogging a few times a week should be something all small businesses are doing. The more a business blogs about the niche they are in, the more they will come off as an expert in their industry. Blogging will draw the attention of new potential customers and will definitely add to your business' SEO and local SEO Internet marketing campaigns. It would be ideal to blog daily (including short blogs), but twice a week is also a great target.

2. Article Marketing: Article marketing is something that can yield dramatic results for small businesses. A business should write an article about their niche and then submit that article to at least ten article directories. Doing this will help businesses reach out to new potential customers who visit those article directories. A business should write at least one article a week and submit it to directories the same day they write it. The articles should be at least 300-400 words, as most article directories prefer articles to be that long.

3. Videos: Creating a video and submitting it to video social networking sites like YouTube can make a huge splash for a business. Businesses should create at least one video each month, and the video should be about the niche that they are involved in. Videos have a way of rising in the search engines and eventually a business's video could do well and garner tons of traffic from search engines. Think about your Facebook Wall; how often do videos tend to go viral and really circulate around the Web. YouTube is growing in importance and can really set you apart from your competition if made and marketed intelligently and after a lot of research.

4. Giveaways: Giving away free items with the purchase of specific items is a great way to increase brand awareness. A business should give away items that are actually useful to their customers. Customers will spread the word and potential customers will then hopefully flock to the business.

5. Social Media Marketing: Building up a reputation on social networking websites is something all businesses should be doing in earnest. Businesses need to create profiles on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Pinterest is also a good idea, as you can post photographs of your company and employees and really establish an identity and rapport with your target market. It's also good to look at geotagging photos on Flickr and Picasa, especially for local businesses. You should build up your networks by interacting (engaging) with current customers and asking them to get their friends to follow them on the sites. This will help increase brand awareness rapidly.

PR firms and an advertising agency can help a business achieve results with the above five tips. They can also show businesses many other ways to increase brand awareness.

Sandra Rea works for Master Marketing & PR, a leading Orange County Marketing & Advertising Agency that also specializes in Ghost writing services and Writing services. We provide a package that gives you both the qualitative and quantitative research information you need to create the best marketing campaigns and grow your business intelligently.