Digital advertising is always better than traditional methods in my mind for a few reasons:
1. you can do most of it for free/cheap
2. you can measure the results
3. the benefits dont shut off as soon as your ad ends
I'm not talking about spending money on display ads, sponsored emails, or adwords. Adwords is highly effective but costs a lot of money and if you don't have a good website to drive leads to then it's not a good use of money.
- Start with building a website with a lead gen form - Wordpress and Wix are pretty good for this. Post your online rates. People want to do as much as they can before talking to a sales person. If you can build in e-commerce, even better.
- Write a weekly blog - it wont pay off for a while but Google ranks you based off of backlinks to your site and relevant keywords found on your site. Creating quality content that people actually read will help with both.
- Capture emails through your blog and led gen form and add them to an email newsletter. Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 contacts and you can easily automate a weekly newsletter that looks professional
- Distribute your content through social media and build a following, tagging the OEMs, contractors, rental companies that you are writing about or taking pictures of
- Send your content to industry magazines - they are always looking for new stories and have to create so much content that they usually welcome quest contribution. This gains you backlinks back to your site that help your SEO rankings
- Set up Google My Business and Google Merchant Center - they are both free ways to list on Google local search results and you will show up in the "near me" searches
In total, I spend $99/mo for SEMRush to monitor SEO performance, $20/mo for gmass which allows you to send mail merge emails through Gmail, $0 for mailchimp, I gather 100 emails a month off of LinkedIn for free using Seamless.ai, and track performance of my site for free through Google Analytics.
I came from advertising tech and co-founded
www.gearflow.com to help equipment sellers and renters sell more online without having to build out their own website and marketing strategy. Check us out and let me know what you think.