How to Advertise in a Non-Invasive Way

It’s getting harder and harder to get potential customers’ attention these days. After all, they’ve become immune to ads and commercials. They now control what they decide to hear when it comes to brands’ messages. So how can you get their attention for your local business?

Think Multidimensional

If you’re advertising or marketing, there’s no reason you need to choose a single path for your message. In fact, the more, the merrier. That means you need to be leveraging mobile and local advertising, as well as using email, social media to reinforce your message. We’ll cover mobile and local advertising in this post to get you on track to reaching potential customers without annoying them.

Why Mobile Ads Work

Smart marketing means sending the right messages through the channels your audience is receptive to. Nearly one-third of consumers have subscribed to mobile marketing messages (think Target’s weekly coupons sent via text). So you already know your audience wants to hear from you. Now it’s just a matter of creating a mobile advertising strategy to attract the right customers. Mobile ads come in a few different formats. There are SMS ads, which are marketing messages that your customers have signed up to receive. With those, you send occasional offers, like “Come in and show this text to save $2 on an ice cream cone.” SMS ads are meant to get past customers back in your door with high-value offers. Then there are mobile ads through search sites like Google. Just like you’d purchase a pay-per-click ad on Google desktop, you can target mobile users with a few cool features. When people search for a specific term, like “Kensington ice cream,” they’ll see your ad at the top of their results. If you take advantage of all the ad extensions, a searcher could click to call you or get directions right from your ad. Pretty smart, huh? You can also use geolocation push notifications, if you have a mobile app. With this, any time someone’s within a set radius of your business, they’ll get a notification that there’s a special offer they can take advantage of. It’s timely and relevant.

Local Advertising

Let’s keep going with all the possibilities in advertising. Going back to those Google desktop PPC ads: they’re really effective for local businesses. Just be sure to include your city or neighborhood in the keywords that people search to find your ad. So, purchasing an ad for “ice cream shop” won’t do you any good (and it’ll probably be pretty expensive per click) but once you narrow it down to “Kensington ice cream shop,” then you only have people in San Diego’s Kensington neighborhood looking for you. And there you are, at the top of search results! This is just the tip of the iceberg, but both mobile and local advertising are a fantastic place to start in reaching people in your city that you want as customers.