But today it doesn’t need to – and shouldn’t – be this way.

Ask anyone in the media where they’re prioritising efforts in coming months [...]]]>

It’s no wonder the giants of commerce get the most eyeballs when it comes to marketing and advertising. Their scale and huge budgets dictate where your attention goes.

But today it doesn’t need to – and shouldn’t – be this way.

Ask anyone in the media where they’re prioritising efforts in coming months and they’ll tell you it’s all about ‘hyperlocalisation’.

Hyperlocalisation is all about interacting with individual communities at the community level. It’s a humanistic version of the message conveyed in Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’, a seminal homage to 21st century micro-marketing.

Hyperlocalisation is about being at the heart of humankind, proacting and reacting at a moment’s notice.

So if we’re focused on the man in your street, who do you think holds the ace card? Hint: it’s not the titan of enterprise.

As a small business, you have competitive advantage for the future. The time is now to perfect your advertising techniques to grasp the opportunities that hyperlocalisation offers.

The best news for you is that local advertising to date has been patchy at best, downright appalling at worst. Follow a few of the following tips to make your advertising sing, and you can be ahead of the pack when it comes to steering your business forward in the public eye:

• Keep it short. When you’re scribing the copy for an advert it’s easy to succumb to temptation and try to tell your audience everything. Don’t. You need to create an eye-catching piece of visual media – not recount the bible.
• Keep it simple. Don’t use trade or technical language (unless you’re selling to a trade or technical user base). Studies say the best adverts are understood and have the capability to sell to a seven year-old kid.
• Use technology. Why wouldn’t you tease your advertising campaign in social media? It’s free, targeted and, therefore, why not. Maybe your advert would translate well on to the Facebook platform. Now’s the time to test Facebook Ads; it’s still relatively cheap and you have so much control over exactly the kind of people you can reach using the website. Which brings us nicely on to…
• Know your customer. Make it your goal to find out more about your best customers, every day. Why do they do business with you? What is it that you do so well that keeps them coming back, time and again?
• Be clear.
• Look for symbiosis: Words and pictures in perfect harmony. This is where it’s great to be a pro ad director – you have the budget, you have the snapper and the copywriter arguing it out for the perfect pitch. But as the company owner/creative starlet, you work within your means. The one golden rule is to make your tagline sing the same tune as the pictures on the page. If you’re playing with a pun or an abstract literary theme, the picture absolutely has to illustrate the service or product in more real terms.
• Be random. Get everyone in the company to input into the advertising campaign with a few words or suggestions about the product or service. Talk to your customers and ask them why they like you. This will provide some critical steer on the things about your company that should be highlighted in ads, and all marketing materials, for that matter. If you haven’t found a killer headline or some really smooth visual content for your ad, ask around and brainstorm til you do. It’s eye candy and a catchy phrase that suckers in the buyer every time. Seriously.
• Create urgency. Action words like ‘now’ work well in convincing your prospective customers to do business with you. Be smart and think which words would work best on you if you were your customer.
• Create intrigue. Trailers for launches of products or services are a potent way of reeling people in. Three or four micro adverts before the big bang are sufficient to stimulate a crazy rush of excitement when you’re ready for the big reveal.
• Know your business inside out. You’re addicted to success, which means you know the inner machinations of your enterprise. If someone asked you 100 questions about what you do, you could answer each one with an thesis worthy of a Masters degree. So when you’re brainstorming your ad, you must draw on this encyclopaedic knowledge to make sure that you don’t miss the most important product or service feature from the proposition.
• Read the copy. Often the seed of a fantastic advert headline is lurking within the ‘body text’, that is, the main chunk of text sitting on the page underneath your main event, the headline.
• Tease the emotions. The cornerstone for any effective advert is sparking a positive feeling (or sometimes negative, if you’re looking for sympathy or support). If you have a lovely chocolate bar you want to evoke a warm, fuzzy emotion; if you’re selling a truck you want youraudience to go ‘roar, I’m a MAN!’ or suchforth. A bit like when you used to play with your Tonka truck. Or the first time you caressed the steering wheel of your flash new car.
• Check and check again. There is nothing worse in the eye of a client than to see you abuse their eyeballs with a grammatical atrocity. If you’re going to write the copy yourself, please be sure to have mastery of punctuation. Read, re-read and re-re-read it once done – and have others do the same before publishing the piece.
• Location, location. Where should you advertise? If you want to sell bricks to builders, find a bus shelter outside a cafe or advertise in the Builder’s Bugle. If you want to sell pedometers to geeks, launch a competition to win a barrowload on Twitter. Be sensitive to the environment in which you merchandise the majority of your products and services and be there. All the time.
• Use free! Aside from the obvious advertising channels don’t lose sight of free press release distribution services like 24-7 Press Release, ClickPress and PR Log where you stand to gain valuable column inches – online and in print – for the price of a session at your keyboard.