5 Cheaper Ways to Advertise Your Business

Advertising is an essential component of success for any business. Proper advertising
ensures more sales, but if you choose the wrong options, it can be a very expensive
proposition. Let’s look at five ways you can reduce your business’s advertising
expenditure without affecting your results.

Referrals
A referral program encourages your current customers to send their friends to your site,
and to earn rewards for their efforts. It’s a great way to generate low-cost advertising:
your customers send visitors and earn a small percentage of every sale (or another
reward), then those new customers refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on!
Before long, you can have an army of loyal customers actively promoting your business –
with every new referral, you exponentially increase the chance of getting more
customers. And all for the price of a small commission on each sale or some other loyalty
reward.

Joint advertising
A joint advertising campaign works like any joint venture: you find a related business and
you share the cost of the project. At the same time, you share target audiences,
increasing the number of interested people who see your mutual ad campaign.
Good examples of this kind of advertising build on complementary industries. For
instance, if you run a home aquarium cleaning service, you could work with a local pet
shop. Together, you could offer a discount on your cleaning services, provided the
customer buys their equipment (and fish) from the associated pet shop. Both businesses
benefit: you get access to the pet shop’s clientele, and they get a chance at more sales to
people who would love an aquarium, but don’t like the idea of doing their own
maintenance.

Note that joint advertising is rarely an equal proposition: one party almost always pays
more than the other, as they stand to gain more from the advertising or bring less to the
combined project. Be flexible and ready to compromise.

Most relevant advertising medium
Choosing the most relevant advertising channel is absolutely critical in decreasing your
advertising costs. You’ll have to do thorough demographical research, or invest a little
money in trial-and-error learning to figure out the best medium for your business.
For example, television and radio offer a massive return on investment for some
companies, but if your business targets young adults who spend the majority of their time
online, they may be a bad choice. You would almost certainly be better off investing in
online advertising, or a social media marketing campaign.