Small businesses are often unsure about where to start when it comes to making an impact with their marketing. They have limited time and modest budgets to play with, but this doesn’t mean that they can’t stand out from the crowd.
With a sprinkle of innovation and creative thinking, you don’t need a big budget to make a big impact. Something as simple as using coloured or bubble envelopes from www.bestbuyenvelopes.uk can give your business the edge and have the wow factor!
Let’s take a look at some other ways you can use marketing to make your small business stand out.
Publish great content
What can you write about that will inspire your audience and be relevant to your products/services? Creating content is something you can do yourself and publish on your website blog. It’s also relatively cheap to outsource if you’re not confident with writing the content yourself.
Give out free samples/trials of your products or services
Everyone loves a freebie and as long as you’re not selling high-priced items, you should be able to give your customers a taste of what you do. If what you’re selling is great, then they will come back for more and pay you for it.
Partner with influencers
An influencer doesn’t have to be a big celebrity with millions of followers (although that would be nice). Focus on micro-influencers who have a reasonable following on social media but will promote your products for a lot less.
Make the most of social media
You can set up business accounts on social media completely free of charge and start promoting your pages with your own networks, friends and family. Be selective with which social channels you’re going to focus on as you won’t want to spread yourself too thin.
You can then share your awesome content, any promotions and deals, information about your products and create competitions. You can also use social media tools, such as Buffer, to schedule your content in advanced and analyse how it is performing.
Create a customer referral programme
Word of mouth is still a powerful marketing tool, so offering rewards and incentives for referrals should boost your business. This could be a free month of your service or a discount/saving on their next purchase.
Email marketing
Ask customers to sign up for your newsletter when they visit your website and you should be able to build yourself a mailing list of engaged customers that will provide repeat business. You could offer them bonus content or a discount off their next order for subscribing.
You can then use free services, such as MailChimp, to send eye-catching emails that will entice your subscribers to spend with you. Here is a list of the best email marketing services for you to choose from.
Bringing it all together
Small businesses have plenty of marketing options available to them. Set some time aside to come up with lots of ideas for your business and then hone in on the ones you’re going to focus your time and energy on. Spending a little bit of time on marketing can make a big impact on your business success.