How much of your budget should you spend on advertising? At the Placemaking Group that’s a question we get asked a lot and our answer remains the same. The PERCENTAGE of your budget that gets spent on pure traditional advertising depends on your budget. Wait. This is more obvious than it sounds.
If you have a very large budget, you can have a bigger percentage of that very large budget for traditional advertising. But if your budget is small, there are much more effective ways to get the word out and influence customers, especially if you are a B2B business. Your Web site is most important. You have to have it in good shape, search engine optimized and with some sort of ability to connect directly with would-be customers and clients. After you have that set, next on the agenda is to come up with an outward bound email campaign that reflects your Web site. Once you have that in place think about PR. Getting news releases out on a regular basis, with a Twitter campaign going on at the same time, brings people to your web site and influences the press.
See, we haven’t even gotten to traditional adverting yet. When you’ve got those pieces going that I described above and you have some budget left… that’s when you think about advertising.
And, you won’t be alone. Forbes magazine did an article about how even big advertisers are putting more of their budget in the web and PR. Read it here… “Anthea Stratigos is chief executive of Outsell Inc., a media research and advisory outfit she co-founded in 1998. Its most recent annual marketing study predicts $65 billion will be siphoned away from traditional advertising channels in 2009 and spent instead on companies’ own Web sites and Internet marketing. Forbes spoke with Stratigos about where the market is going.”
