Best way to advertise business/service?

stevek93

Hi all,

I have just finished college for the summer and what to place a few ads around and get the word out in relation to PC repair. I have a Facebook page but seems to be growing no interest.

stevek93

Just note to mods not promoting my work, can edit section about my service if needed.

jimmii

A Facebook page is ok but its hard to really grow that sort of service organically on there. You could use Facebook advertising to grow your likes but not sure if that is the place to attract people to that sort of service. If you are going to use Facebook advertising to promote it I would suggest using the option to try and attract customers to your website as much as growing the likes. AdWords is probably your best bet I would think most people looking for PC repair would be searching on Google more than looking for services on Facebook. Do you have a walk in shop or are you doing it from home?

lucky john

I assume you are just offering a local service. Confine your efforts locally. Posters in shops, maybe leaflets through doors, local free (not for you though,) advertiser newspaper ect. Unless you know your way around targeting google add words you could end up paying for clicks that are usless to you. Word of mouth is useful as well. Tell everyone you meet what your doing. Alway have a card or a leaflet in you pocket to hand out. Most important of all do a good job in the promised time.

Best of luck with it.

CarlowGraphics

lucky john wrote: »

I assume you are just offering a local service. Confine your efforts locally. Posters in shops, maybe leaflets through doors, local free (not for you though,) advertiser newspaper ect. Unless you know your way around targeting google add words you could end up paying for clicks that are usless to you. Word of mouth is useful as well. Tell everyone you meet what your doing. Alway have a card or a leaflet in you pocket to hand out. Most important of all do a good job in the promised time.

Best of luck with it.

Agree.Print is the way to go if your market is localy

M.T.D

As you are targeting local and short term as already stated print would be the most cost effective.
If you are putting out flyers think in terms of thousands not hundreds.
If you are fit and healthy you should be able to put out 1,000 in a day, so spend at least 10 days putting out flyers/cards.

I have known people put out 100 - 200 flyers in a morning and then go home to wait for the phone to ring.
And whether they wait quietly or wait aggressively they still wait.

Having a Facebook business page (with a good url - f...com/crumlincomputerrepairs for example) would be good if you use it to give more details about what you do and collect testimonials, same goes for Google, business places, plus etc.
Use it as a reference rather than a lead generator.
Remember to "brand" your pages

If you decide to do flyers stick to the 2 or 3 biggest problems as headlines and then
more details on Facebook... Google+
and your name and phone number

If the headline does not grab they won't read the rest of the flyer anyway so any more text would not only be wasted but will detract from the headlines.

Gloomtastic!

^ I think the rule of thumb is you have from the letterbox to the bin to get their attention.

damiensw

The best place you can advertise is on local notice boards in your local shops. You could also consider placing an ad in a local newsletter in your area.

cgriffin

Given the nature of the business (technology) I would think it would be important to create your own professional looking website as opposed to hoping to rely on the more traditional forms of advertising and indeed even facebook and other social media channels.
A wordpress site with a nicely designed theme should do the trick and not cost too much.

Try to visualise what your potentila customer is most likely to do when they encounter problems with a computer.

Will they decide

(a) I must go down to the local supermarket and check the noticeboard

(b) I must go through all that junk mail that comes through the mailbox (if they don't already have a no junk mail sign) and see if any of it came from a computer repair company

(c) I must check the local newspaper to see if anyone advertises a computer repair business

(d) I must check out facebook for computer repairs. Its definitely the place to go for this.

(e) I will google it.

Of course sometimes the computer won't be working at all but when this happens most of your potential customers will probably just use another device to run a search.

In the short-term think google adword campaigns but be careful to limit location to run ads to realistic customers and think about using only very specific exact keyphrases for your ads. Think perhaps of current well known virsuses as your keyphrase.

Also limit your daily budget as it could prove to be an expensive exercise otherwise.

Direct adverts to a relevant page on your website and include an offer for new customers on that particular page. It is also very important to have a phone number very visible on that particular page.

Long term think about writing good orginal content (basically blog posts on the most common computer virsus) and use clever SEO tactics to get your site ranking high for relevant.

Good luck with it and don't expect it to happen overnight!