Articles in The 'small-business' Tag

Local Marketing with a Smaller Budget

by Katherine Bennett

Have you ever heard someone say, “Work with what you got?” Some businesses tend to think they need hundreds of thousands of dollars to do anything effective with marketing strategies. However, a business can pull in revenue dollars by working smart with the budget they have available.

Let’s say a local dry cleaning business is looking to expand their pick up and delivery service. They have $2000 a month to spend in search engine marketing. They want to reach new customers in their area and they want to gain at least 30 new customers a month, to start. This means they have about $66 a day to spend, if their business spends the $2000 evenly across a 30 day month. They have a quick online form that people can fill out and they also have a phone number that people can call. It would be smart for this business to take advantage of click to call advertising for cell phone users and use call tracking in their search engine advertising.  Since, the business is not open 24/7, they can use ad scheduling to reach calling customers during their business hours and run advertisements after hours that encourage consumers to fill out their online form. There are other strategies that they can employ, but this is only a taste of how they can reach their goal, even though they have a small budget. For example, they could also look at using local ad extensions which show their addresses when users search for them.  Nowadays, local businesses have to be smarter in how they use their budget.