Introduction
London is a very competitive environment for businesses of all sizes. Effective advertising is therefore a necessity for most of us. This is especially true for small to medium sized companies where every pound misspent is felt.
Let’s have a look at some of the most effective ways to advertise your business in London.
Website
Social media is where most of the attention online is spent nowadays. This however doesn’t mean that social media is all that matters for a London based business in the online sphere.
There is a limited amount of information that social media can communicate to potential customers. It is effective at what it does. However, getting into the details about your services, clearly listing your accreditations or nicely laying out your pricing structure are things that a good website is still the best choice for.
A well designed website is a tool that can turn someone who is vaguely interested in your services into a potential customer. The information you lay out on your website can go in depth about your company but it should also help the visitor get in touch with you easily.
You want to prominently feature your phone number and email address. Ideally you also want to include a contact form of some kind.
Think carefully about the kind of information you want your website to communicate and structure it clearly. Tell people about what you do and why you are the best. Then give them an easy way to contact you.
Social Media
Most businesses can benefit from at least a basic social media presence. You don’t have to compete with all the influencers and content creators in the world.
A small local business can simply use social media as a tool to showcase the quality of their work or share information about what is going in the company.
As long as your content is authentic it doesn’t have to be spectacular.
An important thing you must consider beyond creating your content is how you get the right people to see it. Just posting images on instagram or facebook won’t do much unless the right people see what you’re doing.
The social media sites you are using likely allow you to advertise. And you can target this advertising with very high level of granularity.
You can target people in a specific area of London with specific interests. This can be a very powerful tool.
You can use this to advertise your services and drive traffic to a landing page on your website. However, you can also simply use it to get your social media posts in the feed of people in the parts of London you do business in.
If you run a hair salon in West Hampstead, you can use social media advertising to offer an X% on a particular service and drive people to the booking system on your site.
You can also simply push your daily posts towards to feed of people located within a 2 mile radius of your business.
Both of these are legitimate techniques that can help you gain clients.
SEO and PPC
To expand on paid advertising on the internet, it’s worth mentioning that you can simply pay to have your website come up when people search for specific terms on search engines. Google being obviously the most prominent.
PPC refers to pay-per-click. It allows you to have your website come up on Google when people search for specific keywords. If you run a hair salon in West Hampstead, you can pay Google to have your ad come up when someone searches for “hair salon in West Hampstead” or “hair salon near me” or “hair stylist in North West London” etc…
You can choose very specific terms that you want to target.
This can be a very effective method of advertising your business in London. However the cost for competitive search terms can be quite high. If you decide to go down the PPC route, you can try to get creative and find search terms that are under-priced and target those.
SEO is a very different thing to PPC. It refers to search engine optimisation. This means that you can structure your website in a way that Google and other search engines like. The goal is to have them place your site higher up in search results compared to your competition.
The value of this should be obvious. You can choose to work with an external SEO agency, that can handle some of the technical challenges relating to SEO or you can do some of it yourself.
A good example of what you can do yourself to improve how well your website performs in the search results would be to publish articles on your site and create detailed pages for individual services you are offering.
Separate pages for different services you offer with good descriptions and text including terms people might search for can go a long way to help your website perform well.
Leaflets
We can now move from the online world into advertising with physical media. Leaflet distribution in London is what we specialise in at The Private Postman. So let’s get into it.
Leaflets can be used in the B2B as well as B2C context.
For B2C your flyer campaigns will target privately owned residences in a well defined geographical area. This could be based on demographics or simply the location of your business.
Your leaflets will be delivered to every privately owned residence in your selected area. This is something quite unique to flyers.
For example, if you run a restaurant, you can get a leaflet with a great photo of your best dish and an offer to every household within an X-mile radius of your location.
If you a run a dog-walking service you can have your flyers targeted at households near the three biggest parks you work in.
Hopefully, you can see how if used correctly, leaflets allow for some unique opportunities to advertise.
If you are looking to target social or local authority housing, there are service that allow for this also.
When you are choosing a distribution company to work with, try to to find someone that can also handle the printing and storage of your leaflets. It’s nice to not have to deal with the logistics of moving and storing tens of thousands of leaflets if you don’t have to.
Flyers can also be used for B2B campaigns. These generally work slightly differently to what we described above.
In a B2B campaign you will often have a distributor delivering your flyers to each business in a particular area and giving a short explanation about what the leaflet is about where appropriate.
Per leaflet, B2B flyer delivery is considerably more expensive than residential deliveries but it can also be a very effective advertising method.
Local Engagement
There is a number of things you can do to engage with particular local areas within London.
Sponsoring local events is one of them. There are park runs, markets and other events happening all over London every week. Sponsoring an event like this, is one way to get your business in front of people in areas that you service.
Believe it or not, there are still many local newspapers and magazines being produced in London. If you are after the demographics that are likely to read these, advertising in the local papers might also be a serious option for you.
Outdoor advertising
In this context, outdoor advertising generally refers to billboards. It’s no mystery that there are many of those around London and that they can be an effective marketing tool for some businesses.
However, what we do not recommend is using leaflets as a form of outdoor advertising. Some companies offer the service of leaving your flyers on the wind shields of parked cars.
Do not do this. If you leave a flyer on a wind shield of a car in London, sooner or later it will rain. The leaflet will get damaged and/or stuck to the car. All you’ve created at that point is a potential customer who now hates you and your business as he or she has to clean your mushy flyer from their vehicle.
If you are set on outdoor advertising look towards the billboard. Never leave your flyers on people’s wind shields.
