Bay Area Marketing & Advertising Blog 

Managing a business can be a delicate balance when considering growth, and what you’ll need to do to maintain profitability and long-term staying power. Depending on the type of business, growth can be realized in many ways. It might mean increasing your advertising, launching a new product or service, adding new locations, or hiring more staff.

If you want to excel as a company, it's important to set yourself apart from the competition vying for your customers’ attention. Brands that experience tremendous success do so by differentiating their products and services from the competition. In the process, they improve brand recognition and develop a deeper connection with their customers.

As a business, you want to bring in customers and provide them with the information they need along their path to purchase. That means creating content that will move them through the process by making them more aware of your products and services to making a decision about your product.

Whether you’ve never advertised before or have been advertising for years, it’s important to take a step back and look at the basics. Every business owner has their favorite advertising types, but adding some new tools to your marketing toolbox can boost your reach and increase sales. Here are seven advertising strategies to consider when creating or revamping your business’ advertising plan.

Building a marketing budget can prove deceptively tough. It's not as simple as simply assigning a dollar amount to your marketing efforts based on your current profits or keeping the budget you've always held. Unfortunately, many marketing plans sell themselves short at this early stage. Many times, the marketing budget is divided among pre-existing categories like "paid search ads" and "radio spots" without considering the goals behind those marketing efforts and how to best accomplish them.

In response to the outbreak of COVID-19, states throughout the U.S. implemented "stay at home" or "shelter-in-place" orders to prevent the further spread of the virus. Now, many of these restrictions are gradually being lifted.

What is the Buyer’s Journey? An understanding of the buyer's journey is critical to the way a business interacts with its audience. Without a clear understanding of the buyer's journey, a business can waste a great deal on ad spend without ever really connecting with their consumers. Having a clear understanding of the buyer’s journey and how it relates to the consumers you are trying to reach will help you tailor your marketing materials to activate your target consumer.

We’re all eager to get back to a more normal way of life. Businesses are eager to reopen and connect with customers. Customers are ready to get out and do some business of their own. No one is entirely sure what this will look like or when it will happen. But it’s time - now - to prepare your business to return to market. There's no single “right way” to do this. How you reopen will depend on variables such as new safety guidelines, new product and service offerings, and the degree of pent-up demand among your customer base. Create a solid strategy that reflects the particular needs of your business and your consumers. When it’s time to return to market, your plan will help ease the transition as you welcome back your customers.

Most businesses have never experienced anything like the current pandemic, especially the shutdowns and economic distress that go along with it. Marketing and innovating can feel scary at a time like this. Some people’s instinct is to lay low and hope the trouble blows over. But staying top-of-mind during this time is actually more critical than ever.