Small Business Financing Concepts

Businesses know they must advertise to gain market share, but often they are not too critical about the return on that investment.  Business owners may end up scrounging around for different business cash options to fund that advertising campaign, but then fail to determine the actual value of that campaign. Sometimes the return may be hard to quantify, but there are strategies that can give you a good idea of what is working and what is not, and they are not too hard to implement.

Where Did You Hear About Us?

It’s an easy question for new customers to answer and it can provide invaluable insight into what form of advertising works best with your demographic. You may actually be running different advertisements in different venues, so having a survey at the end of your sales experience that allows someone to tell you where you got the lead can help you plan next year’s campaign better.  This can be done online, or in an email after a purchase, if you were smart enough to get the email address of your new customer.

Promotional Coupons and Special Offers

If you know how many coupons are printed and how many are redeemed and by which zip codes, you can figure out what the return on your investment is for a coupon promotional campaign. If you decide to do a Groupon offer, and you have to pretty much give away your services, you had better assess how the extra volume of work at a reduced price might impact your regular customers. Advertising your business via a group offer is very effective at getting the word out, but you want to make sure it also creates some profit for you as well. At the very least, you do not want it costing you business as you already are paying for the campaign to get the word out in the first place.

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So, how did it happen? Well, it simply stemmed form the fact that we all look up to the most successful companies and brands. In turn, we recognize them, copying their near obsession with brand design, and all the expected miracle that branding does for small business advertising. This is understandable that we look for a leadership from the biggest brands and do our best to emulate that in our efforts to obtain results. Ultimately desired result is to get more sales. But the small business advertising has its own rules and the most successful brand has played by this rule in their early days, often still do!

The explosive success of brands such as 42 below, iPad, iPod, BlackBerry, are backed up by all the basics such as market research, market watch, and a real finger on the pulse of trends, customer needs, and direct communication with the market. This is of course supported with huge associated cost in copy writing, product development and the brand management. So how can a small company with several hundred thousand dollars or even a few millions dollars in turnover, expect miracles from a pretty logo and a beatiful website? The reality is that the design of branding alone is not going to buy a free lunches in small business.

So the time has come to go back to the basics: A sprinter can not win only by wearing fancy Nike shoes and your business will not win the race only by sophisticated branding. Of course branding can helps, but it is best not place it at the top of your list. You see that branding often has to do with satisfying the business owners’ ego with a great view of their business. As a result after all these efforts to get the best look and feel for their business, the owners spend precious energy, that unfortunately did not go into the real branding: your customers experience. Isn’ t your true branding just measured by what your customers say when talking about your business over a coffee or a glass of wine? What is the use of a 3 days branding workshop, if your customers are talking your business down as you failed to “WOW” them? How much your brand can help your small business if your true brand (as the client report) is not up to the play?

So here is a little tip: Save yourself ego driven costs on the graphic beauty. Instead, begin with a careful review of every steps in your customer relationships process, from their first inquiry to the after sales follow up. You will be amazed at how much positive branding you can generate at the zero cost, but with the inevitable results of increased outcomes.