How to advertise your business in New Zealand, step by step

To advertise your business in New Zealand, decide who your customer is and where they are when they need you, set a monthly budget you will not go past, pick one channel that reaches that person in that place, and run one clear advertisement there for at least eight weeks before you judge it. Everything else is detail. This guide is the detail, in the order you do it.

If you already know the channels and want to compare them, our guide to what works does that. This one is the procedure.

Step 1: Write down who you are trying to reach

One sentence. Not "everyone in Hamilton". A person, and the moment they need you.

"A homeowner who has just bought a place and needs the wiring checked." "A parent picking up a coffee after school drop-off." "Somebody standing in a gym who has hurt their shoulder." "A couple who have just listed their house and need a mortgage sorted."

If you cannot write that sentence, you cannot choose a channel, because every channel is a way of reaching a particular person in a particular place. Keep it in front of you for the rest of this guide.

Step 2: Write down where that person is when they decide

Second sentence. Where is that person, physically or online, at the moment they think of somebody like you?

The homeowner with the wiring question is in a lighting store, an appliance store or a real estate office. The parent is in a cafe or at the school gate. The person with the sore shoulder is in the gym, or at the pharmacy. The couple with the mortgage are sitting in the real estate agent's front room.

Some customers are online at that moment. Somebody with a blocked drain at 9pm is typing "plumber near me" into their phone. Somebody who wants a new kitchen in a year's time is scrolling Facebook. Both are real, and they call for different channels.

If you are not sure where your customers are, we built pages that answer it for most trades and services. Find yours at /advertise.

Step 3: Set the budget before you look at prices

Decide the monthly number now, before a salesperson tells you what a package costs. A common range for New Zealand small businesses is one to five percent of revenue. A business turning over $250,000 a year spending $300 a month is at the low end, which is the right place to start.

Two rules make the budget work. First, it is a monthly figure and it runs for at least three months, because almost nothing works in the first fortnight. Second, it goes on one channel, not spread across four, because $300 across four channels is $75 each and $75 buys nothing measurable anywhere.

Our guide to what local advertising costs has price ranges for every channel so you can see what your number buys.

Step 4: Choose one channel

Match the sentence from Step 2 to the table. Pick the first row that fits. One channel.

The middle rows are where most local businesses do best, because a person standing in the right shop is closer to buying than a person scrolling on the couch. We run a marketplace for local advertising space, so this is the part we know well. On Pritty Ghood a local business lists the surfaces its customers already look at, the window, the counter, a screen, a club fence, and you book them online with the price shown up front and all fees already in it. Listings run from about $55 a week and the host approves every booking. It suits a business whose customers visit a specific kind of shop. It does not suit a business whose customers never set foot in one, and the /advertise pages for your trade say which is which.

Step 5: Write the advertisement

Most advertising fails here, not in the choice of channel. The rules are short.

One message. What you do and for whom, in a line a stranger reads in three seconds. "Electrician. Same-day callouts across Franklin." Not a list of every service.

One action. Call, scan, or visit. Choose one and make it big. A phone number in large type is still the best call to action a tradie has. A QR code is the best one for anything with a booking page, because it is one tap and it counts.

A real offer, if you can. "Free quote" is not an offer, everybody does that. "$50 off your first service when you mention this sign" is an offer, and it also tells you which sign brought them in.

Your name, readable from where the person stands. On a counter card, that is arm's length. On a window, it is the footpath. On a fence at the ground, it is the far touchline. Size the type for the distance, not for the page.

Leave out the paragraph about your values. Nobody reads it.

Step 6: Get it made properly

A poster designed on your phone and printed at the stationery shop looks like one, and people notice. For anything that goes on a wall, a window or a fence, use a signwriter. They know the sizes, the materials that survive a New Zealand summer, and how to make a phone number readable from the road. We keep a directory of signwriters with prices shown up front.

Sizes matter more than people expect. A window poster smaller than A3 cannot be read from the footpath. A counter card bigger than A5 gets moved out of the way. Whoever is providing the space will tell you what fits. For online advertising, the same rules apply in a smaller box: one image, one line, one button.

Step 7: Put it up, or switch it on, and note the date

Write down the day the advertisement went live. You will need it in Step 9, and after six weeks nobody remembers.

For a physical placement, check it went up in the position you paid for, and take a photo. Then tell your own staff: the person who answers the phone should know there is a poster in the paint shop, so when a caller says "I saw your sign", they ask which one.

Step 8: Measure it from day one

You cannot judge a channel you did not measure, and measuring is easier than it sounds.

• A separate phone number, or simply asking every new customer "how did you hear about us" and writing the answer down. Every time.
• A QR code that counts scans, pointed at your booking page or your phone number. A poster with a code nobody scans in a month is a poster in the wrong place.
• A "mention this sign" offer, which does the counting for you.
• For online ads, the platform's own numbers, but only calls and enquiries, not "reach".

Set these up before the advertisement goes live, not after.

Step 9: Review at eight weeks

Eight weeks after the date in Step 7, sit down with the numbers. Three questions.

How many enquiries or customers came from this channel? What did they spend? What did the channel cost over the eight weeks?

If the customers it brought in are worth more than it cost, keep it running and leave everything else alone. If it is close, change the advertisement, not the channel, and run another eight weeks. If it brought in nobody at all and you measured properly, stop, go back to Step 4, and pick the next row.

The mistake is judging at two weeks. Physical advertising works by repetition: the person in the tile store sees your poster on their third visit, not the first.

A worked example

A painter in Tauranga. Step 1: a homeowner about to renovate. Step 2: standing in a paint store or a hardware store. Step 3: $250 a month. Step 4: a poster inside a paint store, because that is where the person is at the exact moment. Step 5: "Interior and exterior painting, Tauranga. Free colour advice with every quote. Scan for a quote in 24 hours." Step 6: A2, made by a signwriter, phone number in large type. Step 7: went up on the first Monday of the month. Step 8: the QR code counted 31 scans in the first month. Step 9: at eight weeks, four quotes, two jobs, worth far more than two months' rent. Keep it running.

Most businesses that say advertising does not work skipped Step 1 or Step 8, in our experience.