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Advertising tips

A woman with shopping bags, and the caption, "What your marketing budget should be is (literally for some companies) the million dollar question."

How much *should* a small business spend on their marketing?

Hands down, the question we get asked the most is about marketing budget – how much a small business should spend on its marketing. And unfortunately, it’s one of the few questions for which there is no concise answer. If you ask the great question-and-answer-box of the internet, you’ll get answers ranging from about 2% of revenue to about 11% or 12%, depending on who you ask, how new your company is (traditional wisdom says you need to spend a...
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A wrapped package, with the caption, "If someone tries to sell you a marketing package, tread cautiously. Many fail to fit your unique marketing needs."

Small Business Marketing Packages: Approach with Caution

We’ve all come across them: the AMAZING marketing package deals. You know what we mean; they promise to get your company/product in front of thousands of potential buyers with one easy package. Sometimes they come with a pretty steep price tag, but they sound like such a sure-fire thing that many of us end up taking the plunge and spending thousands of dollars… or sometimes they seem so inexpensive you’d be stupid not to try it out. But wait. Would...
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A pedestrian wait sign, with the caption, "Waiting is hard. But pulling the plug on a good marketing campaign is worse. Trust us."

How soon is too soon to call time of death on your marketing campaign?

The other day, a client of ours emailed us. He said that since the digital marketing campaign we had set up hadn’t produced any results yet,  perhaps we should start brainstorming different approaches. Now, to be clear. in this case, it was way too early to be asking that question, since the ads had been running a couple of days at most. But we liked seeing that he has the right approach to small business marketing—namely that one should always...
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A photo of the moon landing, with the caption, "Your landing page may not be as historic as this landing, but it's super important anyway.""

Landing pages: the art and necessary science

The sad truth about landing pages… Most people have done it:  built really cool and well-thought-out search programs (or social media ads), spent hours on keyword research, carefully crafted the perfect ad copy… and then pointed that ad right at the home page of our website. The fact is, when we don’t use a landing page, we’re cutting the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns by a significant percentage. How much? It’s hard to quantify, but I’d hazard a guess that...
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A city billboard, with the quote, "Great advertisements bring in customers. Bad ads waste money."

The small business guide to making a great advertisement.

Let’s talk about advertisements. On a macro level, there are two parts to effective marketing: deciding the right things to do, and then doing them well. Or, in other words, strategy and execution. We talk a lot about strategy around here (maybe too much?), so it’s probably time to talk a little more about the execution part. For instance, let’s talk about ads. Let’s say you’ve decided where to place an ad, and bought the ad placement (in the local...
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