Whatever the business, however big or small, marketing is key to building success. For small businesses or low budgets, that is a serious challenge.
Luckily, there are plenty of options available, no matter the size of your budget. They vary from free and fast, free and challenging, as well as quick, easy, and a bit of your budget. You get what you pay for isn’t always true.
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Traditional marketing is also effective, for brand awareness, you can place your company’s logo in your merchandise, like a swag box.
1. Focus on Your Business
This is one of those free and fast ideas to help you get yourself on the map. Quite literally speaking. Create a business profile with Google to get your local business to come up when someone searches.
When someone searches for your business or a related business you will pop up in the local section and customers can easily find you on maps. That is if you optimize it properly. You need to verify your ownership to push up the ranking results.
2. Use Social Media
Another free and fast suggestion, but it isn’t as easy as you might think. Building your social media platform is a must, but it’s just as important that you engage with the community you are amassing.
That can be a challenge for a small business owner, but there are free tools to allow you to schedule posts so that even when you’re caught up, you can still be posting content.
You can set aside time each day to respond. Though, a tool like Hootsuite can help you manage it more efficiently if you do have wiggling room in your budget.
Use your social media to drive traffic to your website. Garner engagement by seeking feedback and running polls. Use it for contest information, create informational posts to increase interest, and be consistent!
You can use hashtags to expand your reach across all social media platforms. Look into what’s trending and see how you can work in relevant ones to your post. You can also tag other people and brands in your posts to help attract new customers and clients.
3. Focus on Rankings
Do not underestimate the power of local SEO. The beauty of the algorithm, though they change things up often, is its purpose is to serve up high-quality, relevant, accurate results in response to every search query.
This levels the playing field for small businesses that know how to work with SEO. It’s free! You just need to include keywords that are location-based in the headings, body, and titles of your website content pages.
Boost it by listing yourself in online directories, and publishing regular blog posts related to your area. If you operate online only and you don’t want to focus locally, you can still use keywords to attract attention. It also helps if you create fantastic content!
4. Implement an Email Marketing Plan
If you want to attract new customers while engaging with existing ones, then email marketing might be the way forward. It’s not a new idea, but there’s a reason it persists! The key is being creative and thoughtful with the subject line. You have to give people a reason to open your email and read it.
Your email should offer them something and encourage them to take action, whether it’s to accept a free gift or visit your website and spend. You can separate your email list into two and try out different options with each list to see which approach is most effective. Mailchimp can help you get started.
5. Don’t Forget to Network
Why not apply for an award? Every industry offers them and a win allows you to place a badge in the window and on your website which will get you positive attention and a measure of respect. There’s no better marketing than bragging that you’re award-winning.
This brings us to networking. There is no better way to boost a small business than by attending industry conferences and trade shows. You have to get your face out there and ensure that your business is the name on the tip of everyone’s tongues.
It isn’t just to put your name out there, you will learn plenty too from sales skills to tips on advertising, social media, and marketing. Of course, in a perfect world, you could run major ad campaigns without thinking twice.
While you can’t do that, you might just find discounts or coupons on the web. There are plenty of hosting services that offer steep price cuts in search of new clients. You never know what you’ll find unless you take a look.