A common question I get from small business owners is what are some free or low-cost marketing strategies for my small business? Here are 16 low-cost marketing strategies for small business for 2016 that will help you jump start the new year.
- Grow awareness outside of your store. Do you have a physical business? You must open new revenue streams online by establishing a presence on social media. My advice, pick just one and focus on doing it well. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn — pick one and crush it with regular updates. Many small business owners flirt with social media. Date one. Pick one. Focus on doing a good job with one platform and open up a new branch of your business.
- Grow awareness in the real world. If you are only an online business, find a way to have a real world presence. Use opportunities to connect with potential customers to share ideas and information – not to sell. Step away from the laptop now and then and give away some of your valuable knowledge to be helpful. Helping leads to new relationships and can seed future revenue.
- Be the expert on your topic to local and statewide media. Be the ‘go to person’ journalists, TV producers, etc. can reach out to if they have a need to talk to someone about your category. Prepare a simple one page summary of how you could be helpful if they are telling a story about your industry, your skillset or your products. Suggest a few ideas and touch based with them once per quarter as a reminder. One day, your phone will ring, and you’ll get some exposure and coverage that can help you reach a new audience.
- Write your news story. Can’t write, get a journalism student to help you so that you can pitch the article to local newspapers and magazine who are always in need of free copy-filler and don’t want to pay journalists for content. Keep it fun, light and not a sales-pitch but make sure it tells an engaging and real story. Pitch the article where it might fit nicely. If you are a restaurant in a beach community, provide the free material to local freebie publications who distribute their magazine in print and online to tourist. If you are in a B2B world, target it for the trade. You might get distribution to thousands of potential customers to help drive them to your shop or online store. Check out Help a Reporter website to register your expertise.
- Giveaway Find opportunities to speak at local chamber events or other business networking groups or meet ups. Be in front of people from your community who share a common interest and who might benefit from your knowledge. Be generous. Give away something of value from a simple one-page list of simple ideas that demonstrate your knowledge and ability. Don’t hold back your best ideas.
- Networking is like taking vitamins – do it every day. Add one new connection on LinkedIn each day by reaching out and asking to connect. Don’t try and sell them. Offer them something of value. “I see we both work in X industry. This article (link) was helpful. Thought I’d share it with you. Like to connect through LinkedIn?” At least once each month, invite someone new to have coffee with no strings attached – just to get to know each other.
- Sustain relationships with previous customers – don’t ignore them. More business can come from existing customers. Check in regularly, don’t ignore them. Ask if you can help them, share articles that might be useful or a link to a company using an interesting approach to growing their business that they might consider too. Maybe if you are in B2C, you share a new product offering for existing customers who has a big online following. Ask if you can give them a free product to review online – no strings attached and they can keep the product. Prior customers who were happy with you might also open a door to people like themselves. Treat them with respect but don’t be afraid to ask for a referral. Also, use the phrase thank you more often. This isn’t a frivolous idea. Thank you is powerful.
- Facebook Ads are Easy to Test. Local small businesses can target people in a very limited geography who share an interest in what you do, whether you run a dance studio, a dog walking service or midnight bowling alleys singles night. You can target who sees the ads and Facebook can help you find similar audiences to an existing email list you own. They can find all the men looking to join a men-only yoga studio and put your message in front of them. Best of all, you can test it with a limited budget per day or per period. Take $100 and see what it costs to acquire new customers. If successful, you can spend more to grow more revenue at the pace you can handle.
- Make sure you can finish this sentence: Only we_______________. By being crystal clear on your point of differentiation, you can help customers who need your unique services find you not the competition. If you are an electrician who provides a ten-point check up on every call to make sure your house is safe from electrical shorts – let customers know it. Find a one-sentence approach to telling your unique story. There is always something you do that others don’t. Shine a light on it and make sure customers know what they are getting when they work (or buy) from you. Maybe it’s your 100-year guarantee or you donate 10% of your profits to a local homeless shelter; put that message front and center in your communications with customers.
- Offer Businesses Special Discounts. Verizon recently offered a 10% discount to employees at certain companies if they switch carriers. Instead of ads, their messages came from HR departments throughout the community. Could you connect with businesses and offer special discounts to those employees? Maybe you run a personal training business and offer a free evaluation to the first ten employees who sign up? Perhaps you have a flower shop and give 20% off flowers sent on (pick a slow day like Mondays), to employees who work at a new business in the area. Have a salon, offering half-price coupons to any new customer willing to write a review on your Yelp
- Interview a Potential Client for An Industry Story. If you work in a B2B environment, perhaps you can write a trend article for an industry publication. Interview five of your leading prospects who don’t do business with you today, to get their take on what’s the future holds for your market segment. You get to have some face time with a potential customer asking about their vision and problems they see for the industry helping to establish your expertise. You use the time to ask questions. If you aren’t a great writer, you tape the discussion, with their permission on an iPhone and give the recordings to VA (virtual assistant) to write the story for you. Check out Fiverr to find someone who will write the story for you. This low-cost approach buys you access to meet targeted customers, gets you exposure in industry magazines about your ideas and helps you raise your company’s profile. Turn down to magazines? Publish the story on your blog or website. Don’t have a blog? Publish it for free on LinkedIn Pulse or Facebook Notes. You can also use this technique as a podcast too and its a brilliant and simple way to meet important customers.
- Host a Webinar. If you have products you sell, a webinar could be like an online trunk sale for special customers. Invite your top 25 customers to see the new products and to get special discounts. If you sell custom services like website designs, offer a webinar to help demonstrate the top ten trends for website creation. With services like GoToWebinar and many low costs or free services, hosting a webinar has become much easier to do. It is inviting people from your mailing list or through Facebook ads, showing a PowerPoint of images or key ideas and speaking through a headset. I can think of dozens of ways to leveraging a webinar to get information to customers. Again, don’t sell, educate. Being helpful and educating customers is the new marketing.
- Focus on Building Your Email List. Marketing professionals agree on little, but one thing almost everyone will tell you is that your list is your most valuable asset. You want to reach potential customers directly, not indirectly if you can avoid it. Finding people or businesses that raise their hand and tell you, tell me more is invaluable. How can you grow your list? Think lead magnets or giveaways. A one-page checklist filled with helpful ideas. A mini-eBook (PDF) on a subject of interest or even a collection of previous posts on one topic. Access for a month to free-trial software and on and on. Pop-ups may be annoying, but they can be effective ways to grab someone’s attention and ask them to join your community. Free tools are available through WordPress plugins like SummoMe. You want to build a quality list of interested community members who care about Paleo Diets, Online Cooking Classes or Bespoke Leather Bags.
- Use Video. When you can see someone, you form a quick opinion about their authenticity and credibility. Consider making a welcome video on your homepage of your website so customers immediately get to meet a human being behind a brand. Don’t hide behind a corporate facade. Get real. Communicate your understanding of the story that your customers want to know, not the story of what you sell. Help explain through a video that you can help them solve their problem through your product or service offerings. The video is a low cast method to introduce yourself. Just make sure you have excellent sound because a great video with terrible sound sends the wrong impression.
- Repurpose and Reuse Marketing Content. Don’t hesitate using content that you create in multiple platforms or places. If you spend money getting professional copywriting for your catalog or store, maybe that same content can fit in other places in an email campaign. If you received great PR in a local newspaper, repost it on Facebook or Instagram. Consider how you can squeeze value out of an asset you have created or purchased. For example, if you do have a blog, putting 25 of them into an eBook as a giveaway for capturing an email address for your newsletter makes perfect sense. The video welcome you have on your website could be part of an email campaign. Keep a list of marketing assets so that you can find ways to reuse them often in different platform or locations.
- Remember Why Customers Buy. We don’t buy things. We hire products or services to do jobs for us. Don’t forget that your customers need to fix a pain point and you may have that pain killer. Position what you do as a solution to a need that someone has to get your marketing into high gear. Consumers buy some products for different reasons by different audiences, like a watch can tell the time or be a fashion statement. Some services like insurance help you protect against mayhem. By asking existing customers why they bought from you, can also help you understand what motivated their action. Surveys and in-person conversations can help. But be mindful that consumers and customers can’t always articulate why they did something, often it is irrational. I know that I hated hailing a cab in a city or spending so much for a cab to the airport. I don’t carry cash. Their credit card system sucked. I could describe my pain, but I doubt I could have described the painkiller as Uber.
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Good luck in 2016 hitting your goals and finding new ways to marketing your small business. If you need more specific help, you can find me here. Sign up for my blog via email and get my 147 eBook called UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF MARKETING for free. Happy 2016.
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