The StreetDaunting and expensive.... it doesn’t have to be!
Marketing a new start-up business correctly is a very important stage of starting your new business and can be one of the worst things to do....
Some of the first thing you will be thinking ‘Where do I start?’, ‘How do I market my business?’, ‘How much is this going to cost’. These are all questions that can be answered, but only if you have done it before, there are many paths you can take when marketing a company or product line, for example:
- Radio and Television.
Unless you have a huge budget, this is a BIG NO NO!
Advertising on the radio and television will hit more people all at the same time and will cover a large range of your market if you have the right advert, BUT... if you can afford it.
- Local and national press media. (newspapers)
This is a popular one, but the turnaround is very low and can be very pricey for what it is, advertising your business in the local paper, let’s say the Great Yarmouth Advertiser, quarter page advert for about £300 - 500 for one week! Nice and pricey, but it will reach a large amount of people.
- Printed promotional media. (posters, business cards)
One of the cheapest and best ways of advertising, but does rely on distribution of the media.
Handing someone your business card is a great way for someone to remember you.
- The world wide web. (Internet, website)
More popular than advertising in the Yellow Pages, having a website to accompany your business is one of the cheapest and most efficient ways to help market your business and it opens new paths to go down.
In our experience, before you look at any ways to market your business you need an image/brand to market (see: Corporate branding), then get yourself a nice, tidy, efficient website, that carries your image across and is well developed for search engines like your Google’s and your Yahoo’s.
You now have a constant advert for your company available via one of the most popular ways to display media, search for information and keeping in contact with friends and family all over the world, the World Wide Web (internet).
If your website is well written and optimised (see: Search engine optimisation), visitors to your website can be in the thousands per day bracket, and the cost difference for keeping a website maintained to the weekly cost of advertising is minuet (See: web presence).
We now have a ‘web presence’ and already being found by all the major search engines, now we have the internet being our virtual or digital (whatever you would like to call it) form of marketing, we need a physical form of marketing in the form of full colour printing (See: full colour printing) with posters, flyers, leaflets, letterheads and business cards.
Once your corporate image is in the form of printed stationery, which can be sent to everyone that will, and are using your company’s services, new customers will always follow.
Now we are set, we need an inventive and attractive way to get your company attention, we each business will be different here, what ways can you grab attention and always be remembered for it, maybe run a competition or give away a product to charity, now the thinking has to start and at Evolved Media we have brains spilling out with idea’s... so getting a professional business to help you think of something or even help your idea’s become reality, maybe the way you wish to go.
So let’s break it all down in the form of costs and customer market coverage:
- An efficient website, ready for Google, should only cost in the region of: £299 - £600
- Full colour printed stationery, with a newly designed company brand: £100 - £300
- An inventive way to attract attention to your business: £0 - £300
These prices are just for example, but are a good range to look at.
