A small business owner will consider many factors when buying advertising. Craig Rettig, vice president and director of client services at Praxis Advertising and Design, said that advertising is essential for small businesses looking to strengthen their brands.

“Advertising is an important element of a small business’ overall business plan. It should be done immediately once the business is established and there’s a product in the pipe.

“There would be a series of questions you would want to ask: What would the demographics be? Is this a new product? Is there a seasonality involved? And of course, you’d want to consider budgets as well.

“Budgets would dictate the sort of medium. If you want to do TV, often the client thinks that’s the most expensive, but there are ways to buy TV. If you were to buy cable TV advertising, it could be quite cost-effective, especially if you bought by ZIP code. It depends on the objectives on the target audience that advertisers are trying to reach. If the small business were trying to reach the Greater Los Angeles area versus just a finite part of Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, if you were using cable as a tactic, the difference of buying by ZIP code would be dramatic.

“The percentage of the budget spent on advertising depends on the type of business and the stage of growth that the business is in. Generally speaking, it could be anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent of yearly projected revenue.

“There are lots of different criteria to measure advertising. It could be put against an 800 number you could track call volume and-or you could track sales. Or you could do pre-imposed research that would gauge things like overall awareness of the company.

“You would use these metrics to decide whether the budget should be increased, based on whether you’re hitting those pre-determined numbers. But to have those metrics put in place is a critical component, which I think is often missed. It makes sure there’s a pay-off to the investments being made. Without having those metrics in place, you’re just shooting in the dark.

“A fallacy that small businesses often believe is that advertising is really the realm of a larger business, that they’re not necessarily suited to be running a lot of advertising. Our counsel to small businesses is quite the opposite. Everything that a small business does is an act of branding and is that much more critical because small businesses don’t have as deep pockets as bigger companies have.”