A first-time business owner or small business owners should always look forward to grow their client base and boost their earnings quickly. And to do this you must invest in advertisements to build awareness about the brand, among a larger audience who are or might be your potential customers. There are a number of advertising approaches that you may choose. Strategic investments in advertising can be fruitful for you in bringing valuable business for your company.

But before investing what you should look forward to is:

• To reach out to the right audience. It is you to think and decide which section of the audience is the most appropriate for your product or service.
• Decide upon the medium. As you have identified your potential customer, use the mode of advertisement easiest to reach out to them.
• Track and measure the success or conversion rates. With this you can also realise if that particular mode of advertisement is suitable for your audience or not.
• Choose a time to advertise apt for your product, if you do not have the budget to invest all-year-round. Study your business earnings and identify your busiest seasons.
• Try to remarket. You can create personalised advertisements to engage your audience based on what they have viewed previously on your website. The ads will then be more relevance, and with an engaging posting copy or a discount offer, you can hopefully convert the audience as your customer. 

Now, the most important part, what are the modes of advertisements and how to choose?

1. Social Media Advertising: Probably the most important in today’s time as most of us are looking into our phones all the time. Also, it is a popular choice for small businesses because of its affordability and highly selective nature in targeting the audience. There are a few social media platforms you can choose from:
2. Facebook: A great advertising choice for most small businesses because of its wide usage, and that their ads cost relatively low. There are different ad units from which you can choose from that includes video ads, customer offers, carousel images, lead generation, page likes, event responses and more.
3. Instagram: Instagram, ads have a high visual appeal that reaches out easily to younger audiences. Instagram includes different ad units like that of Facebook. You can also include clear call-to-action buttons to drive the ad/page traffic directly to your website.
4. LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a bit more expensive than that of Facebook or Instagram but is a great option for businesses with a B2B sales model, as you can target industry professionals with specified job titles through LinkedIn ads.

2. Pay-per-click advertising: It is a type of an online advertising where the advertisers pay a fee every time a user clicks on one of their ads, usually through a search engine. The advertisers bid on ad placements within the search engine. It means they set a maximum price they are willing to pay for a user. No click on ad means no charge. This is a form of search engine marketing or SEM, and the mostly used platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads.

3. Mobile Advertising: It is a type of advertising ads are served only on mobile phones or tablets. It can include mobile display ads, search ads, video ads, mobile app ads that are meant to drive downloads for a brand’s app and social media ads designed for mobile devices only.

4. Print Advertisement: It is probably the first and primary advertising method for small or big businesses. But today, with other modes of advertisement, you may find the revenue of print ads much higher compared to that of the digital ones. It is also difficult to measure the success of the ads and the conversion of customers. But if your target audience is older and less digitally engaged, print advertising in the modes of newspaper or magazine ads, brochures or flyers, can still be a good choice.

5. Broadcast advertising: The mode of advertising that includes mass-market media like radio or television, can be cost prohibitive for small businesses. If you have a local television channel or a radio station that operates locally, the cost might be affordable and relevant too if you have a local business.

6. Out of home adverting: It is that mode which refers to an ad that reaches out to people when they are out of their homes. This includes billboard ads, digital signage, ads in bus shelters, subways etc. These can be quite expensive so be careful before planning.

7. Email advertising: These include brochures, catalogues, sales or newsletters that are sent directly through the mail for personalised connections. While it is a less popular advertising method for small business than digital advertising, it can be successful if you develop a creative visually appealing direct mail campaign that delivers your message one-to-one to local customers.