As a business owner, your ultimate goal is highly likely to be to have more people spending money with you – this means you need to start by building a customer base. To do this you will have to work hard to build awareness of your business with your target audience. By building brand awareness and letting customers know who you are, more people will know about you and what you do. I know this sounds like stating the obvious – that’s because it is, but it’s often overlooked. With a plethora of products in the market that offer ‘instant wins’ it can seem like investment in longer-term, brand-building advertising doesn’t stack up. In the long term, a business of any size needs loyal brand advocates. It is these people who become repeat customers and the financial base of your business. You can always find the odd quick win but a stable, loyal customer base takes focus, time and effort. Let’s imagine that your business sells garden furniture. It’s unlikely that the audience you want to target (probably homeowners, who live in properties with a garden) are all actively looking to purchase garden furniture on a constant basis. It is most likely that the majority of your audience are actually not buying, searching or researching garden furniture at all right now. This means avenues like AdWords/pay per click (although effective when people are active) won’t reach them. Simply put, if I’m not searching for garden furniture today I will never see your ad on Google. Don’t get me wrong, Mrs Garden Furniture Seller, your business probably does need ads on Google, but to reach the biggest part of your relevant audience and to get some of them to come to you before they get all the options that a search on Google can bring, you need ads or content in the gardening section of the magazine they read every month and a big poster outside the garden centre they visit in the spring. By putting the right message in front of relevant people you can make your Google pay per click ads work harder. Did you know firms with significant brand awareness get a higher click-to-conversion rate from Google? It makes sense, as we are more likely to buy from a business we know and trust. There’s more on how this works on our website. Find out more at www.archantlocalimpact.co.uk