Marketing For Small Businesses

Admin September 10, 2019 1 Comment

When it comes to small businesses, budgets are often tight, and marketing is usually an expense that people try to cut where they can.

Traditional advertising methods are costly, but now small businesses have greater access to cost-effective marketing tools. With so many modern marketing tools to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start.

Getting a crafty pitch

It is important to be marketing yourself, no matter where you are. This is where you need to have a compelling pitch. Research has shown in the past that the attention span of an adult ranges from six to eight seconds. This is the time frame where you need to be grabbing a person’s attention.

If you grab their attention and are successful, then you have just under a minute to sell yourself and your brand. You need to allow time to create the best pitch, which will give you a good return on your investment.

Your community

You don’t need to be thinking big when it comes to your marketing. You can see what’s going on within the community. You could sponsor a local sports team, or even a charity fun run. Make some bookmarks and give them to your local library to hand out to people who loan a book or two.

Collaborate

Get a group of non-competitive synergistic businesses together in your community and cross-promote. This can be done via fliers, social media platforms, reciprocal website links and bundled promotions.

Collaborating with other small businesses can help to expand the customer base as you are reaching new people.

Networking

Networking is fundamental to any small business for good reason. The best way to build your business is to get out and meet people. However, networking will take time and it might not always give you instant gratification. Networking with the right people instead of more people will also usually prove a higher ROI. A solid network is the best asset that a small business can have.

Get referrals

Ask for customer referrals. If people are happy with your business, they are often willing to provide a referral if you ask them. You will need to take the initiative to ask as many people won’t do this on their own. Referrals make it a lot easier to get inside the door with many new customers. There is no straightforward formula for asking for referrals. If you run a plumbing business, for example, it doesn’t make sense to ask your client “Do you have any friends with clogged drains.” It would be much wiser to give a business card instead and remind them that if any of their friends ever have clogged drains, they know who to call.

Build the relationship

It is more cost and time efficient to maintain a customer than to find another one. Establishing a good relationship with your customer base is very important. The best way to do this is to keep in touch via email marketing. When a customer visits your store, ask for their email address in exchange for helpful information, discounts/special offers and other relevant knowledge. Consider that it helps the client as well. If we use the previous example of a plumbing business: imagine how much of a hassle it would be for a client to look for a new plumber every time their toilet got clogged.

Offer out coupons

Coupons are an excellent way for businesses to bring in new customers. The research shows that people will happily go out of their way and use a coupon. This indicates that coupons are very successful for expanding a customer base. Coupons are great at getting the customers to return as well.

Using marketing for small businesses is easy and doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Just by doing a few of the simple things above, you can open a new window of getting your name and brand out there. Just keeping yourself known and not letting people forget who you are is an essential part of it.