Broad Street Co has worked with national clients for giant ad campaigns and we’ve worked with small, local businesses promoting a one time event. We’ve learned a few things over the years and our passion to support small, locally owned businesses is why we’ve created ways to work with them to help their businesses grow and compete. Here are our top 5 tips for small businesses to get results with advertising:

Identify Your “Ideal Customer”


When you are working with a smaller budget, every dollar counts. There are many different ways to successfully advertise your business, but finding your audience to get your message to them is the most important place to start. There’s a difference between reaching your existing customers through things like boosted posts on Facebook or Instagram and reaching a new customer. Identifying your customer can then influence where you advertise, what you focus on in your ads, and how the creative in the ad looks. Knowing your audience profile and their behavior can help increase the reach and impact of your campaign.

Create Measurable Goals for your Efforts


Advertising can increase sales, build awareness and create an affinity for your business over the competition. When you decide to spend money on advertising, it is important to decide on a goal for your advertising efforts. Is it online sales or attendance at an event or coupons redeemed, for example?  This can help you determine if your ad campaign was successful. We call this ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). If you spend $1,000 and sell $12,000 worth of merchandise you achieved a 12x ROAS. While advertising doesn’t guarantee a big return, being able to tie a result to a budget gives you a clear directive on what works and what doesn’t for your business.


Know When To Advertise

Even companies with multi-million dollar budgets do not advertise all the time. Most businesses can look at historic sales figures and identify peak seasons or, in some cases, when business wasn’t as good as it should have been. These help create a media calendar and with burst advertising we can help create a “top of mind” impression with your audience.  The slight exception to this rule is with search advertising. Even then, we can throttle back during times of inactivity.

Create a Consistent Brand

People need consistent impressions of your business. Everything from your signage to your social media posts should tie together in a way that even a passing notice signals to the consumer that they come from the same place. Large companies spend huge budgets creating a “Brand Standards” that mandate details including what font is used in a print promotion to what colors can be used in all communication materials. While that may be overkill for small businesses, it is important to be consistent with your messaging and creative. A small investment in things like logo design and signage can help guide all marketing efforts so customers are never confused if a promotion is coming from you or not. Branding helps boost your advertising efforts when customers recognize your promotions and it acts as a shorthand to put you top of mind.

Ask A Professional

Many advertising platforms seem to prey on the small business owner. From the Yellow Pages to Facebook, every ad platform realizes that the small business owner needs to advertise, but is not relying on an advertising professional. From Self serve options like Google Adwords, Facebook and digital billboards, companies rely on the knowledge that the small business owner is not only running their business, but is the marketing director and chief bottle washer, too. These self serve tools make it possible to create an ad campaign in just a few minutes. However, without an in-depth understanding of how to use these platforms we have seen many businesses grow frustrated with a lack or results.  Without understanding what results are valuable, it is hard to know what is working and what is a waste of your ad dollars. That’s where we can help. We can create and manage your marketing and advertising to take the burden off of you, or we can train you how to effectively use self-serve platforms on your own. Our goal is to make sure that you never think advertising doesn’t work!

Easy! Contact us today for a proposal!