Welcome to the final part of this ethical advertising series! If you’ve stumbled upon this blog post as a one-off, make sure to check out the previous parts. This is the last installment of our five-part series, so make sure you’re all caught up before we jump into today’s post.
Today we’re talking about alternative options for small businesses looking to get their name out there that aren’t just Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. We’ll be focusing on both hyper-local small businesses and businesses that are a little larger and might need to reach people in a larger circle, geographically.
Even though social media is still a great addition to marketing strategies and can sometimes be a great tool, with all these inconsistencies coming up, we don’t want it to be the end-all-be-all of your business’s success.
With the unreliability of social media lately, putting 100% of your marketing and advertising efforts into social media would be inadvisable at best, and detrimental at worst.
For hyper-local places, we recommend going to community spaces and posting or giving out posters or flyers to locals in town. The more people in the area know about your services, the more they can recommend you to other people they know looking for help in your area of expertise.
Whether you sell products to a specific niche area or you’re a restaurant trying to get your business to start turning a profit, the more people who know about you, the better. Even if they don’t end up being customers themselves, they may know someone who could end up being your perfect patron.
The power of word of mouth isn’t one to be underestimated – especially in hyper-local settings where people talk about their needs to one another to find solutions instead of immediately going to the internet. People in smaller towns often do this, but it can happen a lot in cities as well. Universally, if you want to know what’s really good around town, you ask the locals.
For larger companies that have to cover a greater geographical area, we think working on your website and pivoting to put some more effort into Google ads could help. With a larger population of possible customers, searchability becomes more and more important. You want your business to be found by anyone looking for that service, with no physical restrictions in terms of place.
Focusing on keywords and SEO research can help your website become more searchable so that more people land on your site when they’re looking for your services. Google ads are proving to be more reliable than social media campaigns as of late, and making sure your website comes up on the first page of search results is a must.
Going back to the posters/flyers concept, on a larger scale, billboards are a creative advertising strategy that we’ve started to move away from with the rise of social media. We think they shouldn’t be forgotten.
A couple years ago, we created billboards for Yankee Harley-Davidson in Bristol, CT, and had them shown on the major highways that lead to the dealership. The thing about billboards is that you really can’t miss them. With social media, you can swipe away quickly, but with a massive billboard on the side of the freeway, everyone gets their proper time to shine with the passersby.
These are just a few ideas outside of the social media world for how you can try to get your name out there and bring in more customers or clients without being at the whim of the dreaded algorithm.
If you’re interested in diversifying your marketing strategies and want some guidance, reach out to us! We’d love to hear from you about your struggles and work together to find solutions.
Thank you so much for following along with us for this blog series!