The Price of Starting a business/brand

The price of marketing products can be very expensive, especially when choosing highly lucrative ways such as working with celebrities. Thankfully, I have decided not to market with celebrities but advertising through social media can be just as expensive as well as more traditional forms of advertising on buses. In this blog post, I want to investigate the price of advertising through my chosen methods to see how costly it would be to advertise like this as a start-up business with little to no funds, just like any other real business. To begin with, I want to Investigate advertising through Instagram. Instagram, owned by Facebook incorporate themselves into one business when going through as a business looking to advertise, although Facebook represents Instagram, it is made very clear that you will not advertise between the two. When filling in the criteria for what the ad for Snapthat to do, it became very clear just how much I needed to pay, for example; If I wanted an Instagram ad placed at 10PM (our time) for one month, I would need to pay $350, that is prior to choosing audience specifics such as age. This is a large expense for any start-up company, let alone someone who may start this a business on the side, Facebook/Instagram could also not confirm an outreach that an advertisement could successfully reach, making the risk outweigh the cons of advertising.

To advertise on a side of a bus, I started by looking through first buses who run the university buses in my example city of Bath, unfortunately, they do not run the advertising themselves but a company known as 'Ticket Media' The website gives some very factual information such as 30% of users of buses being between the ages of 15-24, the highest percentage on their graph. However, the price again is very expensive. A basic quote for local advertising on a bus is £637 and there is no confirmation of how long the advertisement will be on the bus. This seems very risky, however, much like Ticket Media say themselves, you as a brand or business are putting 'the message directly into consumers hands' which is a great way to have direct contact with your target audience.

Another important aspect to look into when creating a brand or business is trade marketing when creating a business or brand name a lot of work goes into creating a name that works for you, it needs to reflect the brand well and concisely, therefore when finding a name that works for you it is important to check it is not already trademarked and if it isn't trademarked, then how much will it be to trademark the name. To do this, I used the gov.com website as I knew it would be the most trustworthy, thankfully, 'Snapthat' was not found on the trademark database, so I set about researching into how much trademarking the name would be. Trade marketing is worked out by the sum of current values of stock in the group divided by the total number of shares in the group, luckily for me, I have no stocks or shares in Snapthat so to trademark the name would be fairly inexpensive! But I need to consider things like employing a solicitor to help with the legal set up of starting a company which can easily be £500.

It is very clear that starting a business is very expensive, from my estimates alone it will cost well over £1500 to market successfully and protect myself legally, this is prior to any success of a business.