Marketing and advertising – making it work for your business

The global marketplace means that you are now competing against businesses from Birmingham to Beijing to Brisbane, so raising the profile of your products and services is vital. But with myriad available channels, you need to ensure you plan marketing spend wisely.

Hot tip: tax deductions

Marketing and advertising spend is tax deductible in most cases. This includes ‘ordinary expenses’ such as the cost of print or online ads (including promotions such as Google Adwords), and even includes content marketing costs such as paying a freelance blogger. However, some exceptions exist, so speak to a professional accountant to confirm details.

It’s all about targeting

To maximise the value of your advertising spend, it is crucial that your messaging is as finely tuned to your target market’s preferences as possible. Whether you choose to use the services of a third party agency, or to carry out marketing efforts yourself, you will need to understand:

• Who your target market is.
• How your products and services address their problems.
• The websites, publications or other media channels your key demographic(s) are most likely to access.

Consistent branding and design will help reinforce your message across all media channels (print, broadcast, digital, social media, etc), and all of your adverts need to be focused on precisely how you can help your clients/customers. Saving time and money are both powerful benefits, but there may be others specific to the people you are trying to target. You need to craft advertising collateral that creatively positions your brand’s unique selling point in the market.

Moreover, in today’s market, you should consider (tax deductible) content marketing spend to boost your multi-channel presence, and to encourage potential new customers to engage with your business in a wider brand-awareness context.

Making sure it works

To assess the return on your marketing and advertising investment, make sure you capture details and track all costs (this is also required for tax deduction purposes). You can then compare the outlay to sales figures to calculate the ROI, and help plan for future campaigns too.