Joel Arndt

As a small business owner, how do you create marketing that is potent and persuasive without breaking the bank?

From advertisements alone, your target market is exposed to thousands of messages every day. Putting a number to it is difficult. Researchers have said anywhere from 100 to 5000 ads per day. When you think about it, almost everywhere we go, physically or digitally, there is advertising.

Corporations have entire departments with seasoned professionals devoted to winning your attention. They employ research and data firms to find out as much about you as possible. Then they spend thousands, even millions on buying ad space in all the places they think you’ll be.

For this reason many small business owners back away from marketing and rely solely on referrals. But you can have potent marketing without investing all of your profit into media buying.

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In 1996 Bill Gates said that content would be the future of the internet. Nearly 20 years later, we can see that he was bang on. In fact, the internet is flooded with content: games, articles, cartoons, videos, memes, podcasts, music, streaming audio and video, and web apps.

To the annoyance of many, corporations have begun to catch on to this as well. We get bombarded with content that just doesn’t matter to us. But any smart organization knows that if they are going to provide an attractive user experience, they have to provide content that matters to the user.

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In advertising, relevance is king. The message of the ad has to matter to your audience. The same goes for news agencies. If the news story isn’t relevant, it won’t get ratings or readers.

How news editors pick stories for each issue will teach you a lot about how to develop your next advertising campaign.

You can make your advertising sound like “breaking news” or a big announcement, but I’m talking more about how news editors pick stories that their audience wants to read or see.

How do you craft advertising that your audience wants to see?

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Whether you like it or not, you don’t have a business without the right attention.

Small business marketing fails when trying to grab everyone’s attention all at once. It’s like being in a coffee shop, shouting at everyone to buy your product. It can work if someone there is desperate for what you’re offering. But mostly you’re going to piss people off.

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