How about advertising for small businesses? With the death of local newspapers and phone books, I'm not sure what effective ways to advertise are.
Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole. And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign.
The problem is, why would you build a startup for a business that can't afford to pay you for the value you create.
I have seen dozens of business start off this way and than eventually become enterprise only platforms or worse, programmatic advertising providers marking up CPMs by ridiculous ripoff margins.
Thanks for the comment.
We feel that this problem is especially pertinent in the field of ecommerce - the folks who run small to midsized ecommerce stores on Shopify, Magento etc.
That's why we built Hits Analytics (http://hitsanalytics.com) specifically to tackle this problem. All you need to do is set the budget and pick a segment of product(s) you wish to promote, and we will automatically create and track Facebook ad campaigns for them (we do the "heavylifting" of optimizing the campaign behind the scenes based on the conversions we are tracking)
This is a very interesting and real problem IMHO that SMBs are facing especially the mom and pop size shops.
I know Amazon tried to solve it but failed, I guess a few of those deal sites too are trying. Right now the only true contender i guess is something like graigslist?
That's the thing. Facebook and Google CAN work, but you hit the nail on the head: 'And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign'.
Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole. And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign.