Your customers and potential customers are bombarded with content all day, including hundreds of ads from businesses who want their business. If you’re a small business with a small budget, it can seem impossible to get your message across – but there are a number of tricks you can use to promote your business. Below are 6 tips to help small businesses like yours make an impact.
#1 Share content on social media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more social networks give you access to more customers than you could ever hope to reach by word-of-mouth, at little or no cost. Build an audience and engage with them by creating a variety of shareable content relevant to your industry – articles, memes, tutorial videos and so on – and don’t forget to share, pin and repost content from your followers, including customers and other businesses who share your values or vision.
#2 Use Facebook boosted posts
Facebook has more usable data on its users – their demographics, location, interests, online activity and much more – than any other social network. For a fee – which is comparatively low if you’re a local business targeting a particular area – those insights can be yours, and you can use them to reach your potential customers with targeted, innovative, measurable and highly effective advertising.
The more targeted your ads, the more effective and cheaper they will be. Spending even $10 a week on boosting your Facebook posts can make a big difference.
If there’s one network we can almost guarantee your current and prospective customers use, it’s Facebook. Although the Facebook audience continues to grow, the organic reach of non-paid-for posts is increasingly limited – in some cases reaching as little as 1% of your audience. If you’re not paying for Facebook ads, you’re missing out.
#3 Make the most of email
If you routinely collect email addresses from your customers when they buy from you, it’s a no-brainer to use that data for email marketing. Encourage all visitors to your website to sign up for your emails, too.
Not only is email marketing cheap or even free (depending on the size of your mailing list), but it can also be done with minimum effort if you repurpose blog posts as email content by automatically sending out a regular (weekly or bi-weekly) digest. There are a growing number of email marketing services out there, but MailChimp is still probably the best: it has all the features you need, including templates to save you a lot of work, and is free up to a certain number of recipients.
If you have a little more time and creativity to spare, create a bespoke email newsletter to keep your audience informed about sales, events, and developments in your business. It’s a great way to establish and maintain a relationship with your customers. If you have the capacity to do so, conduct A/B testing as part of your email marketing to find out what subject lines, email schedule, text body length, and other variables work best for your audience.
Finally, don’t forget to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile devices!
#4 Google AdWords
Google have a number of resources to help your small business gain exposure, including Google My Business, which allows you to own and manage some of the information about your business that appears in Google search results.
But the essential weapon in your Google armory is AdWords, a keyword-based way for businesses to advertise online. If you use a small number of targeted keywords, it can be very cost-effective. You only pay when your ad is clicked. More importantly, it’s a great way to drive traffic to your website or landing page.
#5 Cross-promotion
Cross-promotion simply means marketing more than one product to the same customer. By working in partnership with other businesses, you can target each other’s customers to your mutual benefit. If you find the right company, this can be an innovative way to promote your products or services while sharing the costs of promotion. So what’s the right company? It’s one that:
- Fits your values, brand, and image
- Has a reputation with which you’re happy to be associated
- Has a product or service that complements yours: Do you sell artisan brownies? Why not partner with a monthly coffee subscription service?
- Most importantly, has the same target audience as your business.
#6 Apply for awards
We know: doing good work is its own reward. But being nominated for a local or industry-based award is exciting! Going along to the ceremony to network and be photographed; and then receiving some engraved bling which you can display in your workplace – is a fun, free and surprisingly easy way to promote what you do. It helps to establish your company both to customers and to your peers in the business community. It’s also a boost to employee morale, which is a bonus.
In most cases, the only way to win these awards is to put your business forward for them. So embrace the self-promotion! Keep a list of the kinds of awards you’re eligible for, and make it a priority to apply when the opportunity comes up.
It’s a growing challenge to get your business seen and heard in a marketplace that is more crowded every year, especially with limited funds. But think of your tight budget as a reason to innovate, employ a few of the free or low-cost methods above, and keep working them until they work for you.