I want you to approach this blog thinking about small business advertising like a game.

First, you have to know the rules. You might have some beginner’s luck, but you’ll also make a lot of mistakes. As you develop your advertising and marketing knowledge, you’ll learn more strategies about what works and what doesn’t.

The whole time, you’re learning to play the game. Once you master it, you can control your small business advertising to ramp your revenue and profit up and down based on your current schedule.

So what are we going to cover?

Are you ready to learn how to attract prospective customers for your small business? Read our tips from start to finish or click any of the links above to jump straight to the section that interests you most.

What is the average cost of advertising for small business owners?

According to a survey of 1,800 UpFlip viewers, the average small business spends less than $1K each year marketing their business. Meanwhile, only 15% of small businesses spend over $10K annually on marketing.

That means if you’re prepared to spend over $1K per month, you’re already spending more than most local businesses. As long as your small business marketing is targeted properly, you should get contacted by potential customers regularly.

What is the best advertising for a small business?

Small businesses should take a look at what the big companies do and look for ways to do it with a much smaller budget. Most small businesses and marketers agree that a multi-pronged approach combining content creation and ad campaigns works best.

I know that sounds expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Just record everything you do on your smartphone. You can then upload the video to YouTube and share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and Threads. Then you can use AI to repurpose the video into shorts, transcribe the video to text for a blog, and more.

Don’t believe me? Check out what Gary Vaynerchuk says about how easy it is to make 100 pieces of content per day:

Note that this video is a bit old, so LinkedIn isn’t currently the most effective tactic (it’s TikTok).

Find the pieces that resonate with your target market, then pay to promote those. There’s no point in wasting money advertising a lot of social media posts that aren’t likely to help your small business get potential customers.

Some might tell you word of mouth is their best local advertising strategy, but that’s not guaranteed to make new small businesses sustainable quickly. Developing and promoting content will work for a small business if you stick to it and treat it like a game where you’re learning to maximize your results.

How to Advertise Your Small Business

Your small business marketing strategy should follow a simple seven-step process:

1. Define your target audience
2. Identify the best platforms
3. Get marketing software
4. Craft your message
5. Engage with the community
6. Optimize for digital
7. Monitor and adjust

Let’s look at how to market a small business using these marketing tips.

Define your target audience

First, you’ll want to identify who your new customers are. Start with the basics like:

1. How old are they?
2. What is their gender?
3. Where do they live?
4. How much money do they make?
5. Where do they go for information?
6. What are unique characteristics about your ideal customers?

These answers will be different for each small business, but the answers will impact your advertising strategies in every industry.

Identify the best platforms

You’ll want to identify the best marketing channels to reach new customers. Some of the advertising ideas you’ll want to consider include:

• Social media platforms: Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and X are the major social media platforms. Each has a different target market.
• Search engines: Google and Bing both have organic search results as well as paid advertising and other online marketing options.
• Business directories: Business directories can help you get free local advertising. Google Business Profiles is the most popular, but there are numerous business directories. Don’t forget to look for industry-specific directories.
• Traditional marketing: Direct mail, flyers, yard signs, vehicle signs, billboards, radio, TV, and other legacy marketing ideas are still relevant today and should be a part of your marketing budget, which we’ll discuss next.

You can establish which platforms and small business marketing strategies make the most sense for your target market by researching each platform’s demographics.

Plan your advertising budget

Once you know the types of advertising you want to use, it’s time to put together a marketing budget. Take all the small business advertising ideas you have and write them down. At a minimum, make sure to include a budget for:

• Website: Websites range from free to thousands per month.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software: You’ll need a way to manage customers. CRM software makes it easier. Prices range from free to $250 per user for most businesses.
• Social media management (SMM) software: Most are under $20 per month.
• Paid advertising: Most websites that offer ways to advertise your business require a minimum of $100 per month, but some require up to $1,000 per month if you want to be successful. You’ll want to start with Google, then branch out as you grow.
• Traditional marketing techniques: Depending on your company, you may spend nothing on traditional marketing or the majority of your advertising may be traditional marketing.
• Wages (if applicable): If you have employees who run your marketing, make sure to include their wages.

As a general rule of thumb, most businesses with a chief marketing officer spend approximately half on digital and half on traditional marketing. It’s also approximately equal spending between labor, outsourcing, paid advertisements, and technology.

Learn more about creating a marketing budget.

Get marketing software

The next step is to get the marketing software you’ll need to operate your business. You’ll want at least Google Analytics and the pixels or tracking cookies for any social media platforms that you’re using, or plan to use, for paid online advertising.

Connecting them before advertising could help you collect data before you spend money, which will hopefully reduce the costs of targeting potential clients.

You might also consider one of these SMM tools.

Craft your message

Prepare at least an outline of what you want to communicate, and remember that the point is to be helpful. Once you have an outline, you can record, edit, and repurpose your video. Then share it to your social channels.

Engage with the community

Respond to comments and questions people ask. The more helpful you are, the more people will be interested in your services at some point.

Optimize for digital

As you build a following, you’ll learn what your audience likes and dislikes about the content you create. Use their feedback and analytics software to improve your advertising initiatives.

Make sure you also optimize your headings and content for SEO. We’ll discuss all this in more detail later.

Monitor and adjust

The analytics software you connected to your website will help you understand your users’ behavior. Use it to drive better decision-making.

Don’t be afraid to take down information that is unproductive or ranks poorly, but give it time. It normally takes several months to start developing authority on a subject.

Tech companies are constantly changing their algorithms, so you’ll see times when your rankings may dip. Don’t be concerned. Just look at the changes and understand how to improve.

Pro Tip: While AI can be a real time-saver, it’s not up to the level of someone with decades of experience. It has no personality and life experience, so it’s either regurgitating facts or making up stories. Make sure to add your own personality to any piece to stand out from the pack.

Best Advertising for Small Businesses

The following sections include both paid and free business advertising that every business should be using.

#1. Website

Every business should have a website. It’s your own little plot of digital real estate. Want to learn more about building a website? Check out this blog.

#2. Google Business Profile for Your Local Business

A Google Business Profile showcases your business and helps people easily understand what you do. You can add a logo, pictures, menu, location, and more. It will make you show up in Google Maps and allow people to quickly find your business.

#3. Referral or Review Program

Did you know every month there are over 78 million searches with the word “reviews” in them? That means every day there are more than 2.5 million people trying to figure out how good something is.

There are two main ways they establish whether a company is trustworthy:

1. Referrals: Personal references from people they trust.
2. Reviews: Considering the reviews on trusted sites from people they don’t know.

That means you need the strategy and software to encourage your current customers to refer their friends and write reviews on sites like Google. Consider some of these referral tools.

#4. Google Local Ads

Local service businesses can benefit tremendously from Google Local Service Ads. You only pay for people who contact your business through the ads, and it helps bring in more leads.

Christobal Mondragon makes over $1.5 million per year as the owner of Queen Bee Cleaning Service and considers it his best lead generator. Listen to what he has to say:

#5. YouTube

YouTube is just a big search engine for video. Given it’s owned by Google, YouTube videos are commonly featured in the search engine.

Plus, you can share videos to other social media channels. Consider repurposing tools to help make a long-form video into multiple pieces of content.

#6. Facebook and Instagram

You can’t avoid Meta’s suite of tools. Facebook and Instagram have powerful advertising tools like:

• Business pages
• Shops
• Messenger
• Groups
• Facebook and Instagram ads
• Pixel (used for tracking and remarketing)

#7. TikTok

TikTok is currently the most effective platform that many business owners cite as the key to generating amazing results. Learn how to use TikTok for business.

#8. Email Marketing

Use email marketing to advertise small business initiatives and special offers. You’ll have to collect email addresses with permission, save them in an email automation platform, then send promotional offers and other information to your leads.

#9. Other Free Online Business Directories

Online marketing for small businesses relies heavily on backlinks. Get in as many high-quality websites as early as possible to help build your online community. Check out Hubspot’s list of the best directories to increase brand awareness.

#10. Business Cards

Marketing efforts should go beyond online ads and search engine results pages. You should always carry some business cards to hand to potential customers and other business owners.

You might even get a free lunch out of the deal. Learn about the best business cards.

Top Ideas for Online Advertising

Small business advertising ideas are becoming more focused on digital ads every year. They’re easier to track and can be quickly ramped up and down. Plus, many of them can be reused for other marketing materials.

There are multiple ways to pay for your ad space, including:

• Cost per click (CPC): Only pay when someone clicks on your link in local search ads or social media marketing campaigns.
• Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM): Advertise business to get maximum visibility and pay based on the number of views.
• Cost per conversion or action (CPA): Your business appears in ads, but you only pay when people do a specific task like buy a product.

Look at some of these marketing ideas for small business advertising.

#11. Search Engine Optimization

When thinking about how to advertise a business, you’ll want to consider search engine optimization. It can effectively be free advertising for your small business if you create a piece of content to help your business page rank in local search results.

#12. Google Ads

Google Ads, commonly referred to as Google Adwords, offers advertisement ideas like:

• Mobile ads: Ads only visible on mobile during local searches.
• Shopping ads: Product ads with visuals.
• Search ads: Ads shown in the search engine.
• Display ads: Ads with pictures shown on Google display partners.

#13. Retargeting Ads

When you use paid ads with an advertising platform’s tracking cookie, you can use retargeting ads, which have up to 10 times the clickthrough rate of other ads. Retargeting ads can increase your conversion rate by up to 10%.

#14. Sponsored eCommerce Listings

Using paid product listings on social media or search engines is a great form of small business online marketing for companies that sell products. You can use both pictures and videos for these types of advertisements.

#15. Sponsored Blog Content

You can pay local or national bloggers to write about your business. This form of internet marketing for small business owners will vary in cost based on the quality of the site.

Make sure that the site it will be posted on is a quality site by using a backlink research tool. You’ll typically want to reach out to companies with domain ranks of 50+ that are relevant to your industry.

#16. Podcast Sponsorships

Podcast sponsorships are similar to sponsored blogs. They can be the best advertising for small business owners like musicians who want to use sound to attract customers.

#17. Online Contests or Giveaways

Giveaways and contests are great marketing strategies for small businesses who want to gain brand awareness. Just think about the value it brings to your business and your customers before spending a ton on campaign ideas that miss your target market.

Best Traditional Advertising Ideas for Small Businesses

While the internet provides many ways to raise brand awareness with little or no money, there are plenty of ways for a small business owner to reach their local audience using more traditional methods. Consider some of these options:

1. Press releases
2. Print ads
3. Trade shows and event sponsorships
4. Flyers or handouts
5. Cold calling
6. Promotional products

#18. Press Releases

Sending press releases to local news outlets and your local newspaper are a good way to get your business in front of new local customers. This works especially well for grand openings.

#19. Print Ads

You can also buy print advertising like:

• Newspaper ads
• Billboards
• Direct mail advertising
• Yard signs
• Car decals

#20. Trade Shows and Event Sponsorships

Sponsoring local initiatives can be great for helping local consumers get to know you. You can sponsor:

• Local trade shows
• Upcoming events
• Local charities
• Business awards
• Media outlets
• Radio shows

#21. Flyers or Handouts

Good marketing strategies for a small business also include providing literature to help customers understand more about your business. Keep the information as brief as possible, include contact information, and make sure to use a call to action (ask them to do exactly what you want).

#22. Cold Calling

Cold calling has a low conversion rate, but some businesses still find it highly successful. You just need to have a lot of patience and make sure not to violate cold calling laws.

#23. Promotional Products

Local consumers love free stuff. Many small business advertising ideas revolve around offering a promotional product that customers can try at low or no cost, then hopefully converting them to paying customers.

Just make sure you consider the promo products as part of your marketing materials so that you don’t run over budget.

Which advertising ideas have you tried?

Whether you want to advertise for free or spend money on ways of advertising your business, we’ve covered some of the best ways to market a small business. You should now know how much advertising is for a small business, ways to advertise your business for free, and how to create lots of content for your small business without breaking the bank.

There are plenty more advertisement ideas for business. Which do you like best for your business?