Everyone knows that you need a successful marketing campaign to enable your business to succeed. When you are a small business, you only have a limited budget to spend on advertising. Every dollar needs to be spent wisely with as much value for the money as possible. It is hard to know where to start and how to get the best results on your small budget. Being able to market your business is important to its success, and we want you to succeed. We know it is hard to make decisions, but there are answers out there for you. Some of these tips will only cost a bit of your time, but the exposure you receive will be well-worth the time investment.
It is hard to decide where you should spend your budget. You want any money that you spend on marketing to have a large impact, and there are some big solutions available that won’t send your small business budget out the window. Here are 15 ideas that will help you market your small business and not break the bank. These tips cover online businesses and brick-and-mortar businesses that have websites to let people know about the products and services they offer.
1. Start a Blog
Regardless of the type of business you have, you need a blog. Always host your blog with the domain name of your business so that there is a connection between your blog and your company. You should also write good quality information in blog posts and keep the blog up-to-date and current with new articles every few days. If you respond to the comments made by readers, you will create your own online community that is based around your business. The company KISSmetrics receives more than 70 percent of its web traffic from its blog.
Include funny stories about customers or something you read in the newspaper. This will keep your readers engaged, and they will check your blog updates regularly. If they like your blog, they will visit your website.
2. Be a Guest Author on Blogs
By being a guest blogger on other blogs, you can create links to your website and make a name for yourself in the online community. By posting on relevant blog sites, you are creating a wider web of people who know about your business and its products. It is also a good idea to start helping people who post questions on blogs that are relevant to your business, as this increases your reputation.
By adding your link with each blog you post, you are building a larger online network for your business. This makes it more visible to search engines.
3. Emails
Don’t dismiss the idea of email marketing. Fusion Marketing Partners consider emails a good option for small businesses. It is a cheap way to reach a lot of people. There are a few methods to attract customers using emails:
- For every visitor who looks at your website but does not make a purchase, send them a follow-up email that offers a special discount or other offer if they come back and make a purchase.
- Make it easy for people to opt out of receiving email updates.
- Include links to informative websites or comical items that are relevant to the products or services you are selling.
- Don’t bombard people every day with emails; they will soon disregard them.
- Make sure that all emails are informative, and people look forward to receiving them
- If you are worried about spam, you can have your emails checked by a spam checker tool.
4. Content Marketing
With content marketing you are:
- Creating valuable and relevant content that will keep people on your site longer, and they are more likely to make a purchase.
- Provide information that the readers will stay to read.
- Create more areas of relevant information for your products, such as:
- Blogs
- White papers
- Product descriptions
- Videos
- Reports
- Presentations
- Articles
- Links to useful sites with relevant information
Do an audit on all of your current content to make sure that it is up-to-date and still offering quality information. The better your information is, the more likely people are to return to your site.
It is important to update your information regularly and provide new posts on your blogs every week, at the very least.
5. Website Strategies
Look at hiring an SEO specialist to ensure that your web pages are at optimum levels for getting noticed by the search engines. Choose a reliable company with a proven track record for this work. The initial cost may be a bit high, but the ongoing effects will last a long time.
It is worth it to look at the results from the SEO strategies to determine where your visitors are coming from. Connect yourself to all of the local directories for your area and include your address, neighborhood and business name. In this way, when people look for businesses in a specific part of town, your name will pop up.
6. Twitter
Social media has become a remarkable tool for getting your business known in the social world, and Twitter holds a key for many small businesses to use. Smarta recommends using Twitter because it reaches so many people.
- Use tools such as HootSuite or TweetDeck to organize people who are looking for your offerings and reply to their comments by re-tweeting or adding a comment.
- Use the location of your business as a keyword as well as your business name. For example, if you are a beautician in Los Angeles, set up a Twitter column for people in the area who use words like nails, nail polish or beauty. You can then Tweet these people with offers for specials.
- Run a competition for everyone who re-tweets a comment about your shop and location and offer a free facial or half-price products as the prize.
7. Write a Letter
There are so few people who write personal letters today that receiving one is a real treat. Write in your own hand or use a calligrapher to fashion a beautiful letter about your business and what it has to offer. The Giving Card founder Dan Taylor found this to be a huge success. You will need to do some research on whom to write to but you can get customers from this exercise.
Maybe choose to write to all previous customers and thank them for their patronage, as well as let them know about new products or services that you have to offer. You can possibly include an incentive for their return business.
8. Reward Regular Customers
There is nothing wrong with offering your loyal customers a regular reward, be it a free coffee, meal discounts, product discounts, competition entries or other rewards applicable to your business. Offering a rewards system will ensure that your regular customers will come back more frequently to make a purchase to get closer to the end reward.
For an online business, enter all of those who leave a comment into a monthly or quarterly competition or give them a special discount code to be used on certain days. Even online customers can receive a rewards system for return business. Clothing and accessories company Zappos will often upgrade shipping of regular customers to next day. This is a good strategy for rewarding customers--who wouldn’t want to get an order the next day? Send them an email with a code for free postage on their next purchase or for a price discount.
9. Give Excellent Customer Service
The one thing that will have people talking about your business is offering excellent customer service. People will remember that you were friendly and courteous and could answer any questions they had to ask of you. They tell their friends who come to see for themselves, those friends tell their friends and so on it goes.
You can offer:
- Tea, coffee or water. This, of course, depends on the nature of your business, but if customers have to wait, offer them refreshment. They will be less likely to complain about being made to wait for 10 minutes
- Loyalty rewards that mean something, even a free coffee card from McDonald's McCafe will have them returning
- A pleasant and appealing atmosphere in the shop
- Quick, efficient service by all staff
- Prompt attention to detail
10. Cross-Promotion Locally
Get together with one or more local businesses and do a promotion together. Your businesses don’t have to be for the same sort of products, but you advertise the fact that you are all local businesses. The team at Entrepreneurs.com consider this an important aspect of local marketing.
Cross-promotion works by:
- Each business has an advertising poster and business cards of the other businesses together with you in the promotion
- Each of the businesses will support each other and ask the customers to be loyal to each business in the group
- Have cross promotion loyalty rewards
- By getting together with other local businesses, you are promoting the locality as well as the businesses involved
11. Host an Event
This is one way of getting your business noticed in the local area and neighborhood. There are many different events that you are able to host such as charitable organizations, fun days, sporting events and Scouts events. You can also get together with local businesses to support events or put on an occasion yourself.
- Host a charity event such as Variety that will bring the whole town together
- Sponsor a local sporting team and go to home games
- Sponsor local schools whose athletes go away to compete in regional and state events
- People are more likely to use a business that is helping the local charities and schools
- Have loads of giveaways and offer discounts and special offers for those attending
- Give out as many business cards as you can during the day
12. Attend an Event
- Make use of the free advertising you will gain by attending local market days. All you need to pay for is a stall and have lots of business cards and flyers ready to give away on the day
- Depending on the business, have some free samples available to the first 50 people who take a business card
- Hold a competition where all the people who take a business card are entered. The prize could be a discount off the next purchase or free goods.
Get together with other local businesses or the chamber of commerce in your area and share and swap ideas about marketing, advertising, what works, what doesn’t and how business is in general at the moment. People might have thought of something you hadn’t and vice versa, and it might just work for you.
Look up sites such as Trade Events in the US for a list of yearly events.
13. Add Product Value
Not all businesses want to or can afford to discount products as a way of attracting new and returning customers. Another way is to add value to what they are purchasing. This can be done in a variety of ways, including:
- Holding monthly competitions where all customers have a chance to win a discount on their next purchase
- Get together with a like-minded business and offer a voucher from them as a prize or a loyalty reward
- In this way, both businesses win from the extra customers that is being generated
This tip comes from Alex Harrington Griffin of Partnership Marketing UK who says this can be a way forward that is better than a business offering a specific discount.
An example of this would be a plant nursery holding a competition for regular customers by offering a voucher to a local landscape supplier for mulch, topsoil or garden edging as the prize.
14. Make Your Business Stationery Work for You
Don’t just have your business name and address on letterheads and business cards. Use the empty spaces to advertise what you do or what you sell.
- Use the blank side of your business card to list products and services of your business
- Use a header and footer on all stationary that lists products and services
- Always include websites, Twitter and other social media accounts as well as your name, address and phone number
- Not every customer will be aware of everything that you do, so use the empty spaces to tell them.
15. Turn Regular Customers Into Ambassadors for Your Product
By using your regular customers to promote your brand, products and services, you are tapping into a new way to market your business. It could be as simple as your customers referring family and friends to you or showing other visitors to your web site or business location.
If you know that what you are offering is a great product or service, use the current customers to advertise the fact that they take their business to you. Ask all visitors who thought the service was great to go to Twitter and leave a comment or go to your Facebook page and leave a comment on your business.
As you can see, there are so many ways to market your small business in today’s modern Internet-driven world. Some of them will cost you nothing, like having a Twitter account and a Facebook page. Others may cost you a few dollars but will be worth it for the results that you will get. Of course, nothing works instantly, so you need to be prepared to wait for the results. By offering customers what they need and what they want in the way of products and services, you are guaranteeing their return.
Get to know the other small businesses in your area and ask what works for them. Share some of your ideas with them and see where it leads. You might have just networked some great business partners who will add value to all of your businesses.
* Image courtesy of smartincomeguide.com
