When it comes to marketing, it can be hard to decide where to spend your time and money. Some marketing efforts can feel like setting money on fire, while others can be tied directly to a large increase in your small business. Every strategy has pros and cons but as experienced marketers, we’ve decided to rank the top 5 marketing strategies from okayish to our most recommended. In addition, we’ve included a smart marketing tip to empower each strategy listed below if you choose to pursue any of them. If you are interested in pursuing any of these marketing strategies, keep in mind that PsychVertising provides direct support to engage in all of the strategies listed here.
5. Billboards
Starting off at the top of our list is billboard advertising. We’ve all seen billboards on our daily commutes or on long vacation road trips. They’re placed about 500 feet apart from each other and are essentially a giant flyer for your business where we know there’s going to be drivers. With over 280 million registered vehicles on the road in 2020, it’s not a bad idea to advertise your business where you know drivers are going to be. However, billboards can be a very expensive marketing strategy.
Here are some average costs for different types of billboards:
- Classic billboards: Can cost as little as $250 per month in rural areas and as much as $14,000 per month in midsize or large cities.
- Digital billboards: Can cost between $1,200 and $15,000 per month.
- Mobile billboards: Can cost between $3,500 and $5,000 per month.
- Larger and more elaborate digital billboards: Can start at $65,000 and go up from there.
In addition, for the price of the billboard many companies usually aren’t even entirely sure how much business they’re bringing them because it’s an online website that traffic (pun intended) can be easily tracked from. It can also be hard for people to read your phone number while their car is moving, particularly if they’re the one driving. One tip we recommend to help fix this is using a billboard specific phone number, that forwards to your main number, to track how many calls your billboard is producing. A similar strategy can be used for placing your website on the billboard. You can try giving a url like yourcompany.com/billboard with a special billboard offer.
Rank Summary – Expensive & Hard To Track
4. Printed Material: Business Cards, Brochures, & Flyers
Every business should have a nice, professional printed material available to hand out or place in their office. Business cards are a traditional piece of marketing material that is small and easy to store. Similarly, flyers can be great for handing out at local events or posting around your community. Brochures can be more expensive to print, but they can fit a lot of information into one piece of nice, foldable material.
The downside of printed material is that it usually requires manual distribution. One smart marketing tip we recommend is a little know strategy offered directly by the United States Postal Service called Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM). This allows you to provide the USPS with your printed marketing material and select certain zip codes to have your material distributed to! This is how you get so many coupons in your mailbox. You can use this same marketing strategy that large corporations use to benefit your small business.
Prices – USPS Marketing Mail Flats up to 3.3 oz
EDDM flyers, postcards, and other flats are considered USPS Marketing Mail® products.
- EDDM Retail® USPS Marketing Flats currently $0.223 per piece
- Great for small businesses, restaurants, realtors, and local political campaigns
- Use a USPS.com account
- Send at least 200 and up to 5,000 pieces per day per ZIP Code™
- Drop off your EDDM mailing at the Post Office™
- No special mailing permit needed
- Pay online or at the Post Office
- EDDM BMEU USPS Marketing Mail Flats currently as low as $0.219 per piece
- Best for large volume mailers
- Use a Business Customer Gateway account to prepare and enter a bulk mailing
- No volume limit on size of the mailing, multiple ZIP Codes™ can be selected
- Drop off mailings at a large USPS mail processing center (BMEU)
- Pay with a bulk mailing permit
For example, if you create an easy USPS.com account and drop off 1,000 flyers at your local post office you can have them mailed to one zip code under the retail plan for $0.223 each which is only $223 total! That’s not a bad starting point to be seen directly by your community members at their residence. We recommend using the zip code that your business location is in, so you’re seen by those closest to you. Another tip is including a QR code on your material that takes people to an online page built specifically for those who scanned the flyer. That way you can speak to them with a personalized message, & you can track the traffic to that specific page.
Rank Summary- Essential But Usually Requires More Manual Work To Distribute
3. Website Search Engine Optimization
Having an online website is an absolute business essential in the 21st century for any seriously established business. Getting your website found after it’s created however, is an entirely different endeavor. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) to increase organic (non-paid) traffic. SEO involves optimizing various elements of a website and its content to make it more attractive to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, which in turn can help the site appear higher in search results for relevant search queries.
However, SEO is a lot easier said than done. Here are some of the tasks that comprise search engine optimization.
Key Components of SEO:
- Keyword Research:
- Identifying the words and phrases (keywords) that potential visitors are using to search for information, products, or services related to your site.
- Using tools to determine the popularity and competitiveness of these keywords.
- Creating website pages & website blogs that focus on researched keywords.
- On-Page SEO:
- Content Optimization: Ensuring that content on your website is relevant, informative, and well-structured. This includes using targeted keywords naturally within the content. Long content has more SEO power than short content.
- Meta Tags: Optimizing meta titles, descriptions, and headers (H1, H2, etc.) with relevant keywords to make it easier for search engines to understand the content.
- URL Structure: Creating clean, descriptive URLs that include keywords and are easy for both users and search engines to read.
- Internal Linking: Using links within your site to connect related content, which helps search engines index your pages more effectively and improves user navigation.
- Off-Page SEO:
- Backlinks: Building a network of high-quality inbound links from other reputable websites, which signals to search engines that your site is authoritative and trustworthy.
- Social Signals: Engaging with users on social media platforms to drive traffic and create more opportunities for backlinks and shares.
- Technical SEO:
- Site Speed: Ensuring that your website loads quickly, as slow sites can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings.
- Mobile-Friendliness: Optimizing your site for mobile devices since search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites in their rankings.
- Site Structure: Ensuring that your website has a logical structure, with well-organized content, clear navigation, and a sitemap that helps search engines crawl and index your site efficiently.
- Security: Implementing HTTPS to ensure that your website is secure, which is a ranking factor for search engines.
- Local SEO:
- Google My Business: Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing to improve visibility in local search results.
- Local Citations: Ensuring that your business information (name, address, phone number) is consistent across online directories and local listings.
- Reviews: Encouraging and managing customer reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and others, as positive reviews can boost local SEO.
The good news is, small business owners can do a lot of this in their free time. You can also work in some of these strategies into your recurring business operations, such as regularly asking for reviews or emailing your email list your blogs or certain pages to drive traffic to them. Apart from the list of Technical SEO tasks, most business owners can research and understand these tasks to do their own search optimization for their website. Though, hiring a marketing agency like our can save you a lot of time and make sure it’s done correctly.
The downside? It can take a long time to see results. On average it can take a few weeks, to several months or years to start to see any realized results from SEO efforts. But, once you make those SEO gains they’re usually (not always) yours to keep. The most popular search engine, Google, also tends to highly prioritize big sites and older sites for the top search results. This can make it hard for any small business to break through on the most popular searches.
Our tip for those pursuing SEO is to put some quality time into research for quality SEO keywords. For small businesses, going after long-tail keywords can be less competitive and going after local focused keywords can really be where you’ll get the most return on your time investment.
When it comes to writing blogs, focus on quality over quantity. A few long, well-structured blogs will more greatly benefit your website than a bunch of short blogs. The common recommendation is to have a blog with at least 1,000 or 2,000 words to be worth posting (this article you’re currently reading is 4,925 words for reference). In addition, this helps your site be more flexible with migration. If your website has 150 blogs on it, and you decide to get a new website it will be much harder and take much more time to build you a new website if a gigaton of blogs have to be transferred onto your new website.
Rank Summary- A good investment of time that can compound with consistent, quality efforts
2. Google Ads
Don’t feel like writing thousand word blog posts for your website to just possibly appear in search results? There is a pay-to-play option you can pursue through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Amazon Ads. They’re called Pay-Per-Click because you are charged each time your ad is clicked on, and not charged based on times your ad was viewed (such as the case for social media ads like Facebook, Instagram, & TikTok which we’ll talk about below).
We’ll detail setting up Google Ads since they are the most popular PPC service available.
The process of setting up Google Ads can be different for every business, but the key steps are below.
- Set up a Google Ads Account:
- You’ll include basic information about your business as well as billing information.
- Define Your Campaign Goals:
- Sales: Drive sales online, in-app, or in-store.
- Leads: Encourage potential customers to share contact information or inquire about services.
- Website Traffic: Drive more visitors to your website.
- Product and Brand Consideration: Get potential customers to explore your products or services.
- Brand Awareness and Reach: Increase visibility of your brand.
- Choose Your Campaign Type:
- Search Campaign: Text ads appear on Google Search results.
- Display Campaign: Image-based ads appear on Google Display Network partner websites and apps.
- Shopping Campaign: Product ads appear in Google Shopping results.
- Video Campaign: Video ads appear on YouTube and other Google Display Network properties.
- App Campaign: Promotes app installs or engagement on Google Play and other platforms.
- Performance Max: Automated campaigns across all Google platforms (Search, Display, YouTube, etc.).
- Set Your Campaign Settings:
- Budget: Decide how much you want to spend per day for your campaign. Google Ads allows flexible budgeting, and you can adjust this at any time.
- Bidding Strategy: Tell Google how it’s algorithms should prioritize your budget
- Maximize Clicks: Get as many clicks as possible to increase your opportunities and gather more data about what searches perform best.
- Maximize conversions: Drive as many conversions as possible within your specified budget.
- Target CPA: Obtain as many conversions as possible while maintaining your set target cost per acquisition.
- Target ROAS: Best for optimized shopping ads, get the highest conversion value possible at your target return on ad spend.
- Choose Your Target Audience: Instruct Google to target certain locations, demographics, languages, and devices.
- Ad Scheduling: Choose when you want your ads to be shown. For example, during business hours or 24/7.
- Set Your Target Keywords
- Google Keyword Planner: Use this tool to discover relevant keywords that users are searching for, as well as their estimated search volume and competition levels.
- Manual Keyword Research: Select keywords that align with your business and ad goals. Group them into relevant “ad groups” within your campaign.
- Create Your Ads
- Search Ads: Write concise, compelling text ads that include a headline, description, and a clear call to action (CTA).
- Display Ads: Design image ads using provided templates or create custom banners.
- Shopping Ads: Set up a Google Merchant Center account, link it to Google Ads, and upload your product feed with all relevant product data.
- Video Ads: Create engaging video content for YouTube and partner sites, following the required format and length guidelines.
- Set Up Conversion Tracking
- Conversion Goals: Set up conversion tracking to measure actions that users take after interacting with your ad, such as purchases or form submissions. You can do this by adding a conversion tag (a piece of code) to your website.
- Google Analytics Integration: Link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account to gain deeper insights into user behavior and campaign performance.
- Add Ad Extensions
- Sitelink Extensions: Add extra links below your ad to drive traffic to specific pages on your website.
- Call Extensions: Include a phone number in your ad so users can call directly from the search results.
- Location Extensions: Show your business address in the ad, particularly useful for local businesses.
- Other Extensions: Structured snippets, price extensions, app extensions, etc., to enhance your ad’s visibility and functionality.
- Launch, Monitor, & Optimize Your Campaign
- Campaign Launch: Once everything is set up and you ads are approved by Google’s algorithm, you can launch your campaign.
- Monitoring: Regularly monitor the performance of your campaigns through the Google Ads dashboard. Track key metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Optimization Adjustments: Make ongoing adjustments to bids, keywords, negative keywords, targeting, and ad copy based on performance data.
After reading through the process of setting up Google Ads, the obvious con is how much time it can take to set them up. Another con is how much effort and time it takes to optimize them. New Google Ads campaigns rarely perform well directly after launching. And once you do optimize your campaigns, it’s not a “set it and forget it” process. Google Ads can go from performing well to performing badly if you don’t keep a continuous eye on them. This is very important to keep in mind because if you’re not appearing at the very top of search results, then you’ll likely not receive many clicks at all. The amount of clicks received from appearing on the first position, decreases drastically as you go down the page.
Another con is that Google Ads can be expensive depending on the keywords you’re targeting and the location you’re targeting them in (together that determines your market competitiveness). Google will recommend a budget based on your target market to try to help provide insight into the ad budget needed to compete with other Google advertisers. You’ll need to compete well in order to appear at the top of targeted search results. But appearing at the top isn’t just based on money, it’s based on the quality of your ad copy and the website page you’re sending people to as well. Google tracks how people interact with your webpages, and if your ad copy doesn’t grab people’s attention they won’t click on your ads in the first place. This is especially important considering that your ads will be appearing directly next to your direct competitors.
The pros are that when done correctly, Google Ads can send you high converting leads. That’s because search engine ads are based on search intent. You’re connecting with people who are actively seeking your service’s target keywords, which means they’re more likely to follow through with signing up for your services. If you want your Google Ads done for you, by industry specialized experts with years of experience then reach out to us to discuss how we can help.
Rank Summary – Search intent makes Google Ads a worthwhile place to put your money if you have the time and expertise to optimize them consistently.
1. Facebook & Instagram Ads 🥇
There’s always a big debate on which advertising platform is better, Google or Facebook. So we’ll be directly comparing those platforms below as we detail their pros and cons. We gave Meta ads (the combination of Facebook & Instagram) the gold medal for our #1 spot for a list of reasons from our direct experience.
- Faster To Set Up:
- Create A Facebook Page And/Or Instagram Account for your business
- Set Up A Business Manager & Ads Manager Account for your profile
- Create an image or video (these are called creatives)
- Write ad copy to go with your creatives
- Determine Your Daily Ad Budget
- Set Up Your Campaign by choosing your campaign goal
- Awareness: Show your ads to people who are most likely to remember them for building brand awareness.
- Traffic: Send people to a destination, like your website, app, Instagram profile or Facebook event.
- Engagement: Get more messages, purchases through messaging, video views, post engagement, Page likes or event responses.
- Leads: Collect leads information for your business or brand.
- App promotion: Find new people to install your app.
- Sales: Find people likely to purchase your product or service.
- Set Up Your Ad Set by choosing your target audience: This includes location, demographics, interests, and where you’d like your ad to appear (we recommend both Facebook & Instagram)
- Set up your ads by uploading your creatives & ad copy
- Launch your campaign & monitor for optimizations.
Compare this set up to the Google Ads set up process above, and you’ll notice this is much simpler.
- Easier Ongoing Optimization: Meta’s algorithm does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to optimizing your ads. Since Meta Ads completely removes the use of keywords, most of the optimization that advertisers conduct for Facebook & Instagram ads is focused on changing the ad copy, as well as the images and videos being run. This keeps your ads feeling fresh to those on social media who have seen your ads multiple times (Facebook will even alert you when your ads are due for a refresh so they don’t become stale). It also gives you the opportunity to change the language in your ads to use insights gathered by those who converted from your earlier ads. Noticed that your contact form messages keep mentioning the same services that aren’t directly mentioned in your ad language? Add these in over time to increase conversions. Optimization for Facebook ads also focuses on testing different target audiences to determine the highest converting targets. This includes updating target audiences as well as custom audiences.
- Cheaper: Facebook ads typically cost less than Google ads.
- They cost less because Facebook ads can be harder for beginners to get results from since they are not search-based like Google. Social media ads are in the field of “interruption marketing” which means your ads need to stand out to stop people from scrolling through their relaxed entertainment and take your preferred business action.
- They are also cheaper because there is more competition in the social media ad industry. While Google has near total monopoly on search engines (they are currently being sued by the Justice Department for anti-competitive practices and are innocent until proven guilty) Facebook meanwhile has to compete with other social media platforms people go to for entertainment such as TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter/X, and more. This helps keep costs competitive.
- Below you’ll find a screenshot of data we collected from a mental health center client that has been running Google Ads & Facebook/Instagram Ads for a year. Below the data you’ll see we also did the math to determine the cost per lead if both platforms got the same amount of leads, which shows Facebook saves thousands of dollars over the course of a year. Keep in mind the ad budget for Google was on average much higher ($50/day) than the Facebook ad budget on average ($25/day).
*Note: You can divide these numbers by 12 to get a glimpse into their monthly data. Each client’s ad performance differs depending on their target market. This client has above average performance. The industry average for mental health clients is $50/lead on Google & $40/lead on Facebook.
- Faster Results: If your Meta ads are set up correctly from the launch by an experienced professional, they can start delivering lots of results within the same day.
- Double Bang For Your Buck: By using Meta Ads you get to advertise to users on both Facebook and Instagram, without spending any extra time.
- Extra Bang For Your Buck: In addition, you may also gain new followers on your business’s Instagram profile or Facebook page while running ads on those platforms.
- Quality Leads: While it can be argued that Google ads will always provide the higher quality leads due to search intent, that does not mean leads from social media ads are not high quality. We’ve produced many thousands of high quality leads for businesses for many years that convert into paying clients. While search intent is valuable, it can also be said that someone who stops what they are doing to interrupt their own entertainment and submit a contact form to your business is someone that is also serious about starting your services. Experienced advertisers, such as our team at PsychVertising, know how to create ads that drive this action using advertising psychology best practices.
- More Consistent Budget Spend: While both Google and Facebook have you choose your daily budget for ad spend, Facebook is much more consistent with how much it spends each day. This makes your advertising expenses much more predictable and reliable with Facebook, which is good for accounting and small businesses that can’t afford to go a cent over their set budget. Google’s ad spend can vary wildly depending on what search terms your ads are being clicked on and how much they charge for each term. Not only can Google’s ad spend be a rollercoaster, they can actually go over the budget that you set for them.
According to Google, they will make sure that you aren’t charged more than 30.4 times your daily budget on a monthly basis (how generous of them!). Your ads may spend twice as much on a daily basis. Usually if Google spends a lot on one day, it’ll spend less on other days to even things out. But not always. We learned this nasty fact from running Google ads for our client and realizing that when we looked at the data, their ad spend numbers were high. That’s when we did some research and learned that you give Google permission to overspend if their algorithms determine your ads would be best shown to people who are more likely to convert. This is another reason why it’s essential to monitor your Google Ads, and possibly lower your budget to a point where if you overspend you’ll be okay with it.
Meanwhile, our client’s data for Facebook ads has nearly the exact same number each day and week give or take a few cents or dollars (but never over budget). From the perspective of an ad agency, this gives us peace of mind that our clients won’t place their anger for overspending budgets on us.
- More Memorable Ads: The most common type of ads on Google are Search Ads. Those Search Ads all look the same, apart from a small logo from your website that may appear. In general, it’s all text on a plain white page. However Facebook ads are all creatives, meaning they are images and videos. This creates a much more memorable advertising experience for your target audience when they interact with your ads. Studies have shown that this makes Facebook/Instagram ads much more effective in leading people to remember your company’s brand. Not only that but since social media only presents you with one post at a time as you scroll, you have a user’s undivided attention when your ad appears on their screen. But with Google Ads, you’re always appearing directly next to several other search results which makes it easy to browse through your competition.
- More Accurate Location Targeting: Both Google and Facebook allow you to choose your target locations based on settings like cities, districts, zip codes, or a circle radius around a pinned location. However, after years of experience we consistently find Facebook ads to be infinitely more accurate with location targeting. With Google ads, you will very likely find that your ads are appearing for search terms that have location words in them that are nowhere near your target location (even in different countries). We have a live example below.
As you can see in this search for “mental health charlotte nc” the top result that comes up is a Sponsored ad for Behavioral Health Centers. You would think that an ad appearing in the #1 position for this search term would definitely have offices located in Charlotte, or at least the state of North Carolina. However, when we visited this page and looked at their locations they had no offices in North Carolina.
This isn’t the direct fault of Behavioral Health Centers (though some blame could be placed on their advertisers if their ads aren’t consistently monitored and optimized). They’re far from the only ones. As experienced Google Advertisers ourselves, we’ve seen this issue across dozens of accounts. To rectify this, we may adjust keyword match types in our Google ads to be more picky and only target keywords that directly mention a particular city in them (which limits your opportunities, but also helps keep you from being charged for clicks in irrelevant locations). Or you may add in negative keywords for irrelevant locations as they appear in your search term reports. But you’d have to add every location in the world, that isn’t your target location, to protect your ads from appearing in any city, town, or country that isn’t your own. That’s a lot of work for an algorithm that should be more intelligent.
Meanwhile, we very rarely have this issue with Facebook ads.
All ads may get the occasional out-of-towner who is in your target location but doesn’t actually live there. Some of this is out of your control at times. For example, we had a client who provides mental health services to youth in Houston, Texas. With us having a specialty in marketing to parents, we were running both Google and Facebook ads for them and both were performing well. Then all of a sudden they received an influx of contact form submissions from out-of-towners. Turns out the cause was that Beyonce had traveled from her new home in Malibu to put on a concert back in her hometown of Houston, and this attracted people from all over the world to see her performance. Cases like that can be out of anyone’s hands. Still, all in all Meta ads are much more reliable for location targeting.
- More Consistent Opportunities & Long-Term Sustainability: We find that no matter what’s going on in the world, people will always make time for social media entertainment. Whether they’re feeling relaxed and scrolling for fun entertainment, feeling stressed and want an escape, or is simply part of their daily habits or nighttime routine. This makes Meta Ads a better long-term investment, especially as social media use continues to climb while Google Searches are experiencing a decline due to losing market share to other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and possibly more if Google is broken up under antitrust laws. The meteoric rise in using AI like ChatGPT for searches is also expected to continue to cut into Google’s market share of being the go-to resource for searches. Even Google’s own AI called Gemini now appears above Search Ads that companies pay for, which may deter users from scrolling down the page to see your ad even if it’s in the first position.
We have another real life example to provide that demonstrates the power of social media consistency. This example comes from the same client mentioned directly above who is located in Houston, Texas and runs both Google and Facebook ads for their youth services. During the Summer of 2024, both campaigns were running extremely well and providing their center with a consistent flow of clients from Google and Facebook. Then disaster struck when Hurricane Beryl came barreling through Houston in early July. This hurricane, in combination with less than stellar power grid infrastructure in Texas led many people to go without power and deal with cleaning up their homes from flooding. Right before the hurricane hit, this client’s Google Ads had just hit an all-time record in the amount of leads that came in and at the lowest price thanks to our optimization. Then, when the hurricane came through their Google Ads numbers completely tanked to barely bringing in leads. The client was very understanding in that this was not the fault of our advertisers, especially since we had just hit a new record. But what was interesting to see was that their Facebook Ads leads numbers stayed the same, as if a hurricane never hit. From this, we concluded that the major distraction of dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane absolutely has direct effects on how people spend their time searching for services for their children. But people will always be on social media for their me-time, and by running social media ads you’re in more control of your advertising opportunities by going to them instead of waiting for searchers to come to you.
All of these experiences over the years has lead us to give Meta Ads on Facebook and Instagram the award for our #1 recommended marketing strategy for its ease of set up, as well as quality and consistency of results. This does not mean Facebook Ads are perfect. We’ve experienced multiple technical issues over the years with Facebook, that ultimately fall on our shoulders to fix since our clients have hired us to handle all obstacles that are thrown our way. In addition, leads from Facebook ads can be harder to convert since they weren’t actively searching for your services like they would be for Google Ads or SEO. But better targeting can help make conversion rates better, and with Facebook ads being cheaper you can achieve higher volume of leads to make the numbers game work more in your favor. So if you’re looking for the fastest, cheapest results without sacrificing quality then Meta ads is a great place to invest your money.
And guess what? Because of their value, we offer Facebook and Instagram Ads on all of our service plan tiers including our cheapest tier plan so that all of our clients have access to their platform.
Conclusion
While Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram) won our #1 ranked spot for best marketing strategies for small businesses, that doesn’t mean it’s the end all, be all to marketing. Meta ads aren’t perfect, and every marketing strategy has it’s pros and cons. Our true BEST recommendation is to pursue multiple marketing avenues to take advantage of all their benefits, and make up for the weaknesses between them. By combining SEO efforts, distributing physical materials in your community, and setting up both Google and Meta ads; your business should always have a steady stream of clients ready for you to service. This leads to business growth, increase confidence in your business longevity, and less financial stress.
We offer all of the marketing strategies mentioned in this article in our marketing service plans including websites, SEO, graphic design, Google Ads, and more. That way, you don’t have to do everything on your own and you can take advantage of our experienced expertise.
If you’re curious about what we can do for your business, don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation!
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