Recently Viral Ad Network had the chance to pitch a new annual campaign to one of our clients. We of course think it’s a great concept and idea (otherwise why would we have pitched it – duh!) What my favorite part of it though, was how much ground this campaign will cover. Because we’re an agency focused on smaller local clients we have to work with smaller local budgets.

Generally when we sit down with clients for the first time they will always ask us the same question “How do you advertise on a small budget?” Our answer is always the same – we just have to do a lot with a little.

Some of the beginning changes are easy. If your budget is small, make sure your not stretching yourself too thin across too many mediums. We often see clients who think if they are on the radio, TV, Internet and newspaper then they are set. The problem is if they are not buying each of those mediums at a high enough reach and frequency it can all become a total waste and leave clients thinking advertising doesn’t work.

While we love our clients to have a presence everywhere we sometimes have to come up with the rest of “everywhere” in more of a grassroots fashion rather than paid media. The camping we pitched last week included a lot of grassroots marketing.

(Grassroots marketing by definition means inexpensive and personal marketing that uses people to spread the word rather than buying advertising time on television and radio.)

Another “marketing problem” we like to fix right away when we start working with clients is getting all of their advertising consistent and speaking the same language. If clients are lucky enough to have bigger budgets and can be on several mediums – that’s not the end of the work. It’s imperative the advertising on those mediums is the same message. If you run a special on radio for product A and something entirely different on TV talking about product B – you’re really spending twice as much for half the effectiveness. Why not advertise both product A and B on both radio and TV? Seems obvious right? Well start paying attention and you will start seeing companies all over the place with inconsistent messages.

This consistency also of course stretched far out over paid media. We help our clients make sure the exact same message is presented everywhere, on their paid advertising, on their social media, any grassroots marketing campaigns, and even within their companies (if you’re telling people you’re the nicest people in town, then they show up to your store and your employee’s are mean to them – that is clearly a problem…for a lot of reasons really, but I’m talking about the advertising part!).

Making sure your advertising is all-inclusive is very important, so if you don’t have time yourself to do it – find somebody who does. It will definitely make your spending much more effective.