By Reed Richardson

Like a lot of business owners, Gary Tonniges, Jr. is extremely busy. And when he started Triquest Technologies, an IT management company, in Fort Worth, Texas, nine years ago, he readily admits he didn’t give much thought to his advertising strategy. “Those first few years, my business plan just involved making it another month,” he recalls, chuckling. “The last piece in the whole pie, for me, was the ad and marketing side.”

Most business experts will tell you that Tonniges is far from alone. With all the other hats small business owners are often required to wear—human resources manager, accountant, IT expert—who can blame them if they’re hesitant to take on the role of marketing manager, as well? After all, this daunting task means fighting for recognition in an already saturated media market—where a recent study found that the average American is exposed to an astronomical 2,904 marketing messages each day, only four of which ever elicit a customer response.

Tom Eglehoff, marketing expert and author of The Small Town Advertising Handbook, says the enormity of this market can leave many small business owners paralyzed from uncertainty. “Because of their limited budgets, there’s this fear that nothing they can do will ever work,” he says. “Most of the time, they only end up running an ad because some salesman contacted them. Consequently, they never really think about what ad strategy suits their business best.”

But how does a small business owner with little formal training figure this out? David Minor, director of the Neeley Business School’s Entrepreneurship Program at Texas Christian University, says finding the best advertising strategy starts with simply finding out more about your customers. “The single biggest mistake I see small business owners make is not identifying who their target market is before they start buying ads,” he says. “I tell them to set up short, in-store surveys or just talk to their customers at the point of sale, making sure to ask them how they heard about the business and to learn more about their habits. Once you’ve established that feedback loop, then you can start to design a cost-effective ad campaign.”

Keeping that key constituency in mind, what follows is a basic, small businessperson’s perspective on several different types of media advertising. Full Article