When it comes to advertising there are a number of different ways in which you can do it, but one that is often used (even without people realising they are doing it) is self-promotion. Self-promotion  is attempting to present yourself to others as an accomplished, capable expert in a certain field. There are very mixed feelings on self-promotion. Some people feel that it is annoying and gives the impression that you feel you are an expert on a particular area, when this may not be the case.

Many people are using social media to self-promote their business but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you hand out business cards, talk at network events or write and distribute articles about how you and your business can help others, these are all types of self-promotion and often a method of advertising that works well.  

If you are confident in what you do, then why not promote that to others, after all the whole idea of advertising is to create new business. DJ’s for example, do a lot of self-promoting as when they are playing to a crowd they are effectively promoting. 

As a business owner it is very important to have some sort of a marketing strategy. There so are many different marketing avenues that you may get confused about where and when you should invest your time and money to get the best return. The first thing you need to do is work out how much you can afford to spend on marketing in the short term. Once you know your budget you will be able to work out which marketing avenues are open to you. If for example you only have a budget of £100 per month then you may not want to use a third party marketing company as they are unlikely to be able to do much with your £100. Instead you may decide to do it yourself or find a freelance marketing guru.

If you want to keep your marketing in-house then you will either need to employ someone who has this experience or train up one of your current employees. This will take time but can mean that you save money in the long run.

When creating a marketing strategy try to think of short term and long term goals and some things are pretty instant and others take time. You may decide to give Pay per Click marketing a go or social media marketing which can often have very quick results.

Marketing is a vast industry. All businesses have to do some forms of marketing in order to get orders and retain customers. Even if this marketing is done through word of mouth, it still plays a huge roll in the success of a business.

Some businesses manage to carry out marketing on a shoe string and are still very successful, meaning you don’t have to spend thousands to notice a big difference. If you are going in to an industry which is highly competitive then you may need a larger budget. When it comes to marketing online or offline, the more you invest the bigger return you should see. If not, then it may be that you are not doing it correctly or you are not marketing through the right channels. When having a website created there needs to be a lot of thought that goes in to how it will function but also the appearance.

A good way to market on a budget is to make sure that you take advantage of all the free or low cost marketing online such social media marketing and word of mouth / networking. Ensure your business is listed on free directories and make sure you have a listing on Google Maps.

Social media can be a brilliant marketing platform for businesses to boost their brand and improve sales. The businesses that get the best results from social media marketing are often those that put the most time and effort in to it. Most of social media marketing is free, but If you are willing to do paid for ads then you will usually find that you can attract more views and get a better response to your campaign. Businesses often use paid for ads when they want to promote a particular product or event they have coming up or to boost their initial following on the social media sites such as Facebook.

If you are not using paid for ads then you may need to wait a while before seeing some results. Often you will start off with a small following but as long as you are actively promoting the page and it is of interest to people, this should quickly grow in numbers.  If you only have a small following then you may need to find other existing groups or pages that you can post on, always check with the rules of the group as to what you can post or share. Using a social media expert to help you with the set up and management of the accounts can speed up the process and often allow you to see quicker results. They will be able to advise you of what sorts of things you need to be talking about on the social media platforms and how often you should be doing it.

If you are responsible for marketing for a client it is important that you give them feedback on how it is going. They will often have to put a lot of trust in you to manage their marketing budget and because marketing can be so in-depth, they may not be able to easily monitor what you are doing for them and how successful it is.

Once a month you should have a full review of the stats that you have access to, to check your marketing avenues. If you use social media to direct traffic to a website, then be sure to check the Google analytics states to see how many referrals you are having. You should also set up goals with analytics to see when someone completes a purchase or fills out an enquiry form. This will allow you to go back through their visit and find out how they originally came to your site.

Another way to track marketing is to check the rankings on the search engines. You can do this manually or you may want to invest in some software that will check the ranks for your keywords on a weekly or monthly basis. This will allow you to show your customer that the work you are doing is having a positive impact.

If you have a business and want to market to your local area or areas, then there are a few ways in which you can do so. Having a press release created and putting it in the local paper is a great way to attract local people and can be a free way of advertising.

Many companies have exciting news that simply does not get out to the general public as they do not know how to advertise it. Another way of advertising locally is to do leaflet drops. With so many companies doing leaflet drops you need to invest wisely in your choice of words and pictures for your flyer to get it read. Printing leaflets can cost a lot of money so you may want to start on a small scale and check if it is effective first before investing more money.

Hiring a local PR company (especially one that is linked with the local newspapers) and asking them to write a brief article about the product / event or service you wish to promote often does not cost as much as you think. This article can then be distributed to all the local newspapers and literature to boost the reach of your customer base. This article can also be added to your website and social media sites to ensure you get the best out of it.

We all have competitors out there who often rank above us on the search engines and seem to be able to attract more visitors. But to a business owner it can be very frustrating and sometime shard to understand why a business that is smaller than us in terms of staff and turn over etc, can be doing so well on the search engines.

The search engines all have their own ranking algorithm to sort out who appears where when a phrase is searched for. Geographical location has recently become a big player in this area, meaning if you are trying to target locations other than where you are based, you may have to work that bit harder.

There are many tools and software out there that will allow you to track your competitors in terms of their rankings, back links, page rank and content. Using these tools can sometimes give you an overview of what they may be doing that pushes them in front of you. It is not always to say what they are doing is correct though, and taking on techniques that could be seen as spamming could actually get your site black listed and removed from the search engines altogether.

When a website goes live the search engines will rank it for certain keywords and phrases based on their own criteria. Although no one (apart from the search engines) know exactly what they check for when ranking sites they do give us an idea of what they are looking for.

Checking the progress of your website can be a mundane task and eat up hours of your day or week. There are many companies out there that offer tracking software. If you use a marketing company then they may have tracking software and already doing this for you, if not then you may wish at looking at a third party tracking software package. They often start from about £20 per month dependant on how many websites and how many keywords you wish to track and possibly how often you want them tracked. If you are going to use this software always get a free trial and do your research to make sure the results they show you are accurate.