If you’re looking for ways to get the most bang for your advertising buck, here are four effective strategies you can use right away to maximize your ad spend:

1. Cut down on waste.  This one seems obvious, but if you’ve been running the same old ads in the same old print publications (like free community “mailers” or local coupon books), you may not only be wasting trees, you may be wasting marketing dollars that could be better spent on other initiatives.  If you really want your business to be at the tip of your customers’ fingers, you’re going to need a plan that includes online and mobile, for starters.

2. Publish on multiple channels that are integrated for maximum reach and impact. Use your marketing content, special offers, or coupons on a variety of online channels like websites, social sites, e-news blurbs, local SEO profiles, blog posts, etc. You can re-use content over lots of different channels, giving your audience a way to receive messages on whatever channels (and devices) they are using. Using multiple online channels lets you get the word out to lots of people all at once, and those people can then share the information further with their friends and contacts. Like ripples in a pond, your marketing messages can spread online, reaching more potential customers than any single channel (like a print ad) on its own.

3. Be consistent. Skip the seasonal special on direct mail advertising and opt for a longer-term, comprehensive plan that contributes to your bottom line month over month. A special “Christmas in July” sale won’t help much if you don’t reach out to customers with consistency during the rest of the year. Every week or month you should be providing clients with quality, useful content (like coupons, articles, how-to info, etc.) across a multi-channel marketing system. That way, your messages will be consistent both in quality and timing (cadence), and your results will keep improving over time.

4. Use a firm that is Google Certified. Playing nice with Google (and knowing how to do that) is a specialized skill. If you’re going to be spending dollars on online advertising, make sure you work with a firm that is AdWords Certified. If you don’t know what you’re doing, AdWords can be very expensive and surprisingly ineffective. (Same goes for other paid ads, by the way…)

For many small businesses, marketing budgets are small to begin with, if they exist at all. But with a multi-channel, integrated marketing approach, your marketing becomes a cost-effective, repeatable, and measurable system that delivers new leads, customers, and sales for your business each month.

The post Tips for Maximizing Your Ad Spend appeared first on Five Sparrows, LLC.