How a Small Town Business Can Out Brand McDonalds and Starbucks
by Ty Hulse

Lets face it, it's impossible for a small business to beat out McDonalds, Starbucks, and other large companies when it comes to national branding. These companies have deep pockets and can spend a fortune on branding campaigns, getting their message out more then any small company could hope to. Small Businesses however have a huge advantage marketing in a small town. This advantage stems from Geo-Targeted focus and direct knowledge of your towns customer base.

The internet is changing everything it is now possible to show your ad on the internet thousands of times to those in your little town only for as little as a dollar a day. You can build a website that is interesting and unique for your customer base, providing them with direct interaction with you. One idea for adding content to your video site would be to hold a competition for best short web video in your town, offering different levels of free coupons to winners and participants. This could attract everyone in your town to your website repeatedly, to see what the newest submission is and of course to see who the winners are. This is better then any ad McDonalds could make because it was made by the people in your town.

You can help to support local bands, using their music videos as your video ad campaign, as will as part of your website. Further as large scale restaurants can only afford so much national marketing you can show more internet ads then they do in your small town, allowing you to become the dominate brand there.

The first thing you need to do in order to become a dominant brand is figure out what your brand is. Think of what you stand for, come up with a few words for your personality and stick to them. Next figure out what this personality means, is it best suited to serve families, teenagers, dating couples? Figure out exactly who you want to market to and then find the websites in your ad network that fit this. Build landing pages and content for this group, if for example your main demographic is dating couples build a mini-site discussing dating, this way you can have a search ad campaign dedicated to this as well.

Think carefully about the marketing methods that are best suited for your restaurant, and are the most affordable. It is strange to think that so many restaurants will advertise in the newspaper no matter what their demographics are. For example many restaurants trying to reach the younger crowd will advertise in the newspaper. But very few high school students read the newspaper, and this form of advertising is very expensive. For the price of a single newspaper ad that is seen by 5,000 people and only a couple dozen high school students a restaurant could have their ad seen tens of thousands of times on MySpace, You Tube, and other popular places for teenagers online. Mix your campaign with video ads, banner ads, local Google ads, and text ads. All of these have there place and each can help to expand your brand.

Ty Hulse is a marketer with http://www.creativegi.com, and is working on a blog to help with marketing in Prosser Washington http://www.prosser-washington.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/