Advertising for small businesses in New Zealand: what actually works

Advertising for a small business in New Zealand comes down to one question: where are the people who might buy from you already looking, and how do you get in front of them there without spending money you have not made yet?

That sounds obvious. It is also the thing most advice skips, because most advice is written by somebody selling one channel. This guide goes through all of them, what each one tends to cost here, and who each one suits. Pritty Ghood is one of the options in it. We run a marketplace for local advertising space, so we have a view, and we have tried to keep it to one section rather than the whole page.

Start with who your customers are, not with a channel

Before any of the options below, answer two things in a sentence each.

Who buys from you, and where are they when they decide? A plumber's customer is standing in a hardware store or a paint shop halfway through a job. A cafe's customer is walking past at 7.45am. A mortgage adviser's customer is sitting in a real estate office. A physio's customer is in a gym, a sports club or a pharmacy. Where a person is when they think of you decides which channels are worth anything.

How far do they travel to reach you? A dentist draws from a few suburbs. A boutique builder draws from a whole district. A tradie with a van draws from wherever the van goes. This decides whether local, regional or national reach is worth paying for. Most New Zealand small businesses are local, and most of the money wasted on advertising is spent reaching people who will never drive to you.

With those two answers, the list below sorts itself.

The free things, which are not optional

Google Business Profile

If you do nothing else, do this. A Google Business Profile is the panel that appears when somebody searches your business name or "electrician near me", and it is free. Fill in every field, add photos taken on your phone, keep the hours right, and answer reviews. A profile with recent photos and a dozen reviews outranks a bare one every time, and for "near me" searches it matters more than your website does.

Cost: nothing but an hour to set up and ten minutes a month.

Your own website

It does not need to be big. One page that says what you do, where, how to contact you, and what it roughly costs will do more than a ten page site nobody updates. If people can find your phone number and your prices in under ten seconds, it is working.

Cost: a template site from a few hundred dollars a year, or a few thousand for one built for you.

Being findable on social media

Not posting every day. Having a page that exists, with your hours, a photo of the front of the shop, and a phone number, so that somebody who hears about you from a friend can find you in one tap. Facebook still matters more than anything else for local New Zealand businesses, and community Facebook groups are where a lot of local buying decisions start.

Cost: nothing.

Paid online advertising

Google Ads

You pay each time somebody clicks an advertisement that appears when they search for something you sell. It works well for services people search for at the moment of need: a blocked drain, an emergency dentist, a locksmith. It works poorly for anything people do not search for.

Typical cost for a small NZ business: a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars a month in click spend, plus a setup fee or an agency fee if somebody manages it for you. Clicks for trades and professional services in New Zealand often cost several dollars each, so a small budget buys a few dozen visits a week. Track which clicks turn into jobs, or you will not know whether it is working.

Facebook and Instagram advertising

Cheaper per person reached than Google, better at putting a picture of your work in front of people in a particular area, and worse at catching somebody who is ready to buy right now. Good for cafes, retail, events, fitness, anything visual. A boosted post costs from a few dollars a day; a properly targeted campaign is more.

The trap is the vanity number. Two thousand people "reached" is not two hundred customers, and it is usually not two.

Print and broadcast

Local newspapers and community papers

Still read in many New Zealand towns, especially by people over fifty. A display advertisement in a community paper costs in the low hundreds per insertion depending on size; a run of several weeks costs several times that. Works for businesses whose customers are older and local: health, home services, real estate, funeral directors, garden centres.

Radio

Local radio packages tend to start in the hundreds of dollars a month and go up quickly. Radio builds name recognition over time rather than bringing anybody in this week, so it suits businesses with a long life and a steady budget, and suits nobody who needs customers by Friday.

Flyers and letterbox drops

Printing is cheap: a thousand flyers costs a couple of hundred dollars. Delivery is the real cost, and the response rate is small, so the arithmetic only works when one job is worth a lot: a roof, a kitchen, a new heat pump.

Billboards and street signage

A small billboard in a provincial town rents for well over a thousand dollars a month and a metro site is many times that. Effective for name recognition, out of reach for most small businesses, and impossible to measure.

Physical advertising inside other local businesses

This is the one we run a marketplace for, so here is the honest version.

Every local business has surfaces that its customers look at: the front window, the counter where people wait to pay, a screen in the waiting room, the mirror in the gym changing room, a fence at the sports club. Most of them are empty. Putting your advertisement on one of them puts you in front of a specific kind of person at a specific moment, which is the whole game in local advertising.

Where it works: an electrician in a lighting store. A physio in a gym. A mortgage adviser in a real estate office. A kids' swim school on the cafe counter where parents wait for their coffee. A builder in the timber yard. The match between where the advertisement is and who is standing there does the work.

What it costs on Pritty Ghood: listings today run from about $55 a week for a counter display or a window poster to a few hundred a week for a busier space or a screen, and club sponsorships are priced by the season. The price shown on a listing is the price you pay, with all fees already in it. The host approves every booking, so you are never put up somewhere that does not want you, and campaigns run from two weeks to a year.

Where it does not work: if your customers never set foot in the kind of business that is listed near you. Check who is listed in your area before you decide it suits you. We are adding hosts, and we say so on the browse page rather than pretending otherwise.

Sponsorship

Sponsoring a local sports club, a school event or a community fundraiser is the oldest form of small business advertising in New Zealand and still one of the best. Your name on a team shirt or a fence sign at the home ground is seen by the same few hundred families every Saturday for a season, which is precisely the audience a local business wants.

Typical cost: from a few hundred dollars for a junior team or a single hole at a golf day, to a few thousand for a senior team or naming rights to a tournament. Clubs are increasingly listing these packages online, where you can see what you get and book it without a committee meeting. We wrote a separate guide to sponsoring a local sports club.

Word of mouth, and how to help it along

The best advertising most small businesses ever get is a customer telling a friend. You cannot buy it, but you can make it easier: ask happy customers for a Google review, put your name and number on the van, and make the shop front and the counter say clearly what you do. None of that is glamorous. All of it works.

How to choose, in five minutes

1. Set a monthly number you will not go past. Most small businesses in New Zealand spend somewhere between one and five percent of revenue on advertising. Start at the low end.
2. Do the free things first: Google Business Profile, a page that answers the basic questions, a social presence that exists.
3. Pick one paid channel where your customers already are, from the list above. Not three. One, so you can tell whether it is working.
4. Measure it. A different phone number, a "mention this ad" offer, a QR code that counts scans. If you cannot tell whether a channel brought anybody in, drop it before you spend more.
5. Give it eight weeks, then decide. Almost nothing works in two.