After having your own business idea, and knowing the way to fund your business, next thing you must face is that how can you put your business brand in customer mind.
For large brands with big marketing and advertising budgets, one or even several hundred dollars is just a drop in the monthly marketing budget. But for entrepreneurs and small business owners, every dollar counts – and investments need to pay off in real and immediate marketing ROI. So budget is the first criteria I consider in this topic.
Top 5 ways to market your small business
- Leverage your community
Your business absolutely doesn’t become global after one or two months, especially for the small business. You need to focus on the local market.
Therefore, you don’t have to think big when it comes to your marketing efforts. Think locally. What’s going on in your community? Sponsor a Soccer League team or a 5km Charity walk/run. Print bookmarks and leave them at the local library or big supermarket. Get to know your ideal customer and think about how and where they spend their time. Then search for opportunities to get in front of your customer with your marketing message.
Targets are not only customers but also is the competitors, all-stars teams don’t just study up on their own game plan, they check out what competitors are doing so that they can look for opportunities to beat them.
When you spend time for researching the market, do it effectively
- Make email becomes your main market channel.
With a cost at about 20 to 50 dollar per month via email marketing platforms such as Constant Contact or Campaigner, you can get up to 5000 contacts.
Email marketing comes in high on our list of recommendations for small businesses and startups, because it works. Regardless of industry or organizational size, marketers across the board point to email marketing as the tactic that produces their highest return on marketing dollars invested. $44.25 for every 1$ spent on email marketing is the number reported by Target.com in 2014.
Not only store owners see this way is very effective, consumers also regularly say that email is their preferred channel for brand communications.
For the small business, I especially recommend this method for marketing.
- Social channel
Just with the cost at the middle of $50 and $70, you can put your brand, products or services in front of thousands of members of your target audience each month.
Even a small investment in social marketing can produce hundreds of new followers on social networks as well as increased web traffic, brand awareness and hopefully bottom line profits that can be traced back to initial engagement on social media.
For each target area, you need to find out what is the most popular social channel at there. I know Facebook is popular in American, or if you are in Europe, Twitter can be more effective.
- Optimize for crowd appeal
It is no longer the time when word of mouth is the best marketing. Now, before making a purchase decision, most consumers go online before heading out to a store and may spend a while gathering the information they need.
How your brand appear on customers’ desktop when they go online?
Small-business owners and entrepreneurs that do keyword research and build out their websites in accordance with best practices in search engine optimization (SEO) will be rewarded by search engines with more favorable SERP (search engine result placement) in organic search results. In other words, they will get more website traffic because their business listings will be placed directly in the path of prospective buyers who are researching products or services, or who are looking for a business online.
So, optimizing your site with more and more top keyword can bring your brand closer to customers.
- Collaborate
Put together a group of synergistic, non-competitive businesses in your area and agree to cross-promote. You can use coupons, fliers, reciprocal website links, bundled promotions or social media platforms. (Okay, I had to add a little bit of social media to the mix.).
By collaborating with each other, you can expand your customer base because you’ll be reaching new people.
Capital keeps your business operates, but marketing makes your sales. Don’t undermine this step.
Check out this link below if you are interesting with small business:
