Small Ideas For Low Cost – Yet Effective Marketing For Small Businesses
In a world of public marketing campaigns, newspaper adverts and national T.V. ‘prime-time fillers’, it can seem like a small business will fail straight away or has very few options available when it comes to advertising.
The truth is that for small businesses, marketing doesn’t have to be super expensive to be effective or profitable. In fact, there are many ways to put your business offerings in front of consumers and many of them are either completely free – only time needed, or so effective they immediately pay for themselves.
Here we will take a look at the hottest way to promote right now.
Online Marketing
The amount last year on the industry of digital marketing grew by 44% last year in the USA and the UK to $52 billion, and future forecasts estimating that global totals on such marketing tactics are approaching closer to $100 billion.
In the late year of 2016 alone, online advert revenues were at a staggering £17.6 billion, and that’s a 20% increase from the previous year of 2015 when a total of £59.6 billion was spent online for digital ads.
This demonstrates just how important marketing on the internet is to all businesses, no matter their size.
Create Video Content & Promote It
Just over two-thirds of internet browsing consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a relevant video online. This means that making videos should be at the top of a businesses to-do list, especially with already nearly 90% of online marketers are already using video content to promote their business!
Remember, whilst most video marketers are heavily reliant on the big video platforms such as Youtube, if you wanted to reach a local audience then something to consider is, the use of Facebook video and locking your shop/group to your designated demographic area.
There’s no reason not to use videos, regardless, because they can be totally free if you designed and produced it yourself. And finally, another benefit is you can get lots of free traffic to your Youtube videos from Google if you learn a few basic SEO concepts which can be found to help you online.
Write, Promote a Website and Blog Content
Have you ever heard of ‘Content is King’? Right? Yes, but promotion is queen; No? Well, now you have!
Having public relations within your business greatly relies on a mixture of an online presence and a physical medium that customers can easily reach the business’s products or services.
If your business does a lot of marketing on a stall or even if you have a car sales depot, there are ways to boost potential sales with things like custom banner design and specially made signage.
It doesn’t matter how articulately written your articles or blog posts are if nobody’s reading them. This means that if a business wants to get their content seen to promote potential sales and other leads, there needs to be an active way to promote the blog content using organic channels as well as sometimes, paid ads – as long as you learn to get a positive return of investment on the costs of the ad spend.
Get Listed On Google Places
Being on Google makes it easy to list your business which then becomes available on their search engine for completely free.
With over 20% of the people using the search engine’s queries being for local information, that presents a huge opportunity for you to get free marketing. But what exactly do we mean by Google places? This is where talking about the ‘Maps’ section just below the Google adverts.
These are generally free listings which businesses can take advantage of to get that extra visibility and deliver content to a local audience. If you have a physical stock store or offices, then you can get your business registered with Google local which will do the same thing so to speak.
What else can a small business do to take advantage of free marketing? Let us know in the comments below!