There are some things that small business owners can do to market themselves very effectively, while working with a very conservative budget. These days, a big budget is not required for big results.
Here are three powerful tips for small business marketing success:
Play To Your Size
Remember who you are and who your competition is. Just because the bigger, badder company down the street is blowing all their money on a television campaign, doesn’t mean that you have to produce a 30-second spot of your own.
What you do is important. But just as important is HOW you do it. You can use your size to your advantage when it comes to how you treat your customers. Being smaller means being more agile and better able to respond to shifts in market trends.
Brainstorm a list of ways you can use your current size to your advantage over your bigger competitors.
You Get What You Pay For
Online advertising is becoming a required element of any successful business’s online marketing campaign. Pay-per-click advertising on the search engines is one of the most cost-effective means of leveraging this new advertising medium.
Because your ads are only displayed when people search for keywords that you specify, you are automatically getting a more highly targeted prospect using PPC advertising. And since you only pay for those people who actually click your ad, you don’t have any extraneous marketing expenses.
By simply testing and tweaking your ads, the keywords they are displayed on and the marketing copy on the page you send visitors to, you quickly gain control over your advertising campaign.
An additional benefit is that since you are essentially paying for this type of advertising as you go, you can set daily or monthly spending limits or literally stop a campaign in its tracks if it is not performing well enough.
Try Something Different
In addition to looking at your competitors to see what they are doing to attract new clients, try also looking outside of your own industry for insight and inspiration on new ways to reach the hearts and minds of your target audience.
Quite often, business owners get stuck looking at what their specific industry is doing and simply jump on board to try and follow suit. This not only has the undesirable effect of looking like you are playing “follow the leader”, it very seldom leads to innovation.
Every time you are personally in a buying space or are aware that you are being marketed to, pay attention to how you are being communicated to. What is the message that is being delivered? Is the delivery somehow unique or unusual? What stands out about the interaction?
Using what you learn from other industries you will be able to lead your own marketplace with fresh, innovative marketing ideas that will have your competition scrambling to catch up with you.
