The ultimate goal for every business is to sell their products or services. The million-dollar question is, How can you get your products in front of your target audience? The best way can be offering quality products and providing amazing services that can solve their problem.
Note this point, your job is not accomplished just by designing amazing product. There are so many important factors to consider. One of the key factors can be “Promoting your business”.
When the company budget is tight, marketing can be the foremost thing to cut off. If your following that rule, then stop it right now.
Do you know there are numerous marketing strategies available? Implement every strategy to promote your business. The happy news is, it doesn’t blow your budget. Depending upon your business, the strategies may vary. For example, if you’re running a coffee shop business, promote your brand with custom hot shot coffee sleeves.
Let’s get started!!! Following are the top 20 cost-effective ways to promote your business.
Create an effective marketing plan
Time is money for every business. When your marketing processes are unplanned or unstructured, then you’re wasting money. The ultimate key to business success – create an effective marketing plan. No matter whether you’re running a small or large organization. Set long term and short term goal in your marketing plan.
Get started with identifying
- Who are your potential customers?
- What are the effective ways to reach them?
- What is their last purchase?
- How long there are spending on your website?
- What social media platforms they’re using?
- Who are your competitors?
- Set your budget?
There you go!!! These are the important key points to create an effective marketing plan. A marketing plan can differ from basic to complex.
Set up a website
People prefer to shop online rather than offline. If you don’t have a website, then it’s time to purchase a website. Having an effective website is important to promote your business. Build a responsive and user-friendly website to attract customers. Optimise your website as per search engine guidelines.
The website can be the best choice to advertise your products or services. Also, your customers could be eager to know about you. Create an ‘About Us’ web page and write about your journey, products, branches and more.
Publish great content
Content is king!!! Writing quality content is a choice. Don’t you agree? Yes, you can work hard to create valuable content and build a powerful brand. On the other hand, you can choose the easy way by writing poor content – This will have a bad impact on your search engines and audience. It can result in waste of resources.
The path for every content writer is clear – to rank high on search engines, improve traffic and conversions. In order to boost everything, you should have a quality and valuable content on your website, social media or blog.
Search engine optimization
SEO is the process of improving the “quality and quantity” or traffic, visits and leads to your website or blog through organic search results. Keeping it simple, SEO (search engine optimization) can make a low budget go a long way.
Business owner strictly focuses on SEO to generate organic traffic to their website.
- Get your website registered on Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.
- Focus on on-page optimization by including page time, meta description and alt tags.
- Conduct keyword research and include primary and secondary keywords.
- Implement Google analytics.
- Get listed in local directories.
- Optimize mobile SEO.
- Don’t forget to include social media buttons.
Offer quality products and services
Providing quality products and excellent customer service result in customer satisfaction. Also, it’s the best way to compete with your competitors in the market.
Give strong reasons for audiences to shop with you. By providing quality products at a low price. Offering discounts and deals on sitewide products or services. Also, providing warranty on every product purchased by the customer can build trust.
List your business
Did you know Google, Yahoo and Bing offer a free listing? Yes, you can register for free. Everyone is searching for your businesses. Never miss an opportunity to earn a new visitor, be listed on search engines. Enhance your listing by providing every detail about your business to your customers.
- Products
- Services
- Contact number
- Business hours
- Address
Create instructional videos
Instructional videos are constantly growing their popularity. Want to promote your business in the best way then implement instructional videos on your website or social media platforms.
You don’t need to spend your time and money by hiring a graphic designer to create professional videos. Thanks to today’s technology, there are few video editing tools available online. Make the great use of these video editing software and create beautiful videos. Make a note, the length of the video should be less than 2 minutes.
Infographics
Incorporating multimedia content in your business marketing plan can be the best approach to increase visibility. Infographics can work perfectly on content marketing. Because amazing infographics favour to generate maximum engagement on the social channel when compared to other forms.
Infographics get more likes, shares and comments. That means social media users are engaging with your post. As a result, your business gets more visibility. Use few data visualization techniques such as timeline, charts, pie-diagram to make complex data easily understandable.
Grow your network
Business entrepreneurs are a big fan of the term “Networking“. It’s the best way to promote your business products or services. Arrange a meet up at a coffee shop and have a conversation about their business and get to know people more.
Capture the advantages of networking to sponsor and grow your business by shaking hands. Networking requires only one thing i.e “Time Commitment“. Though it doesn’t provide gratification at the same time, it’s important to have a powerful network and it is the greatest asset for any business owner.
Give a speech
Do you like hearing to speech? Of course YES. Many people fancy listening than reading. If you want to capture the attention of the audience and prospects, then implement business presentations.
Having a strong presentation skill is important to deliver a message excellently. Also, it can help you stand out from niche competitors and connect with a new audience.
- Prepare an outstanding presentation and think strategically.
- Explain the topic with good examples, statistics, advantages and future enhancements.
- Start your presentation by telling a short story.
- Speak with confidence.
Advertise on Google Adwords
Driving traffic and conversion for a new business can be a daunting task. For those businesses, Google Adwords is a better option. It is an advertisement platform to promote your business. You can run text ads, banner ads to drive traffic to your website.
The topmost advantage of using Google Adwords is, it works quicker than SEO. Sounds amazing right? Yes, SEO and Google Adwords are SEM (search engine marketing) strategies that drive maximum visitors and conversions. Apart from generating traffic and clicks, it is also an effective method to tell online users about your business.
Give new life to existing content
Are you running on a tight marketing budget? Then it’s difficult to afford a content writer to post content for your website or blog. While considering tight budget, instead of hiring a new content writer, you can give a human touch by enhancing the existing content.
Tons of information is available on the internet. Take a look at a blog and gather important and interesting information. Also, add images, pie charts, bar diagrams to make your ideas and predictions depending upon the information.
Recycle the content
Does it sounds amazing!!! When you get impressed by certain content, you start reading the content from start to end. You would like to create content on a similar topic and post it on your website or blog. Try mashing up the content and promote your business in the best way.
How about recycling the content? Great idea right. Recycling is the best way to attract an audience. Turn your webinar into an instructional video. Transform all the blog articles into an ebook.
Referral Marketing
Earning a happy customer is more important than earning a customer. Because a satisfied customer does more legwork for your business. Do you know, more than 50% of purchasing decisions drives from word-of-mouth referrals? Amazing right!!! Implement a referral marketing approach and advertise your brand.
Provide quality products and exceptional service to get referred by your customer’s connections. Give customers a good reason to promote your brand. Attract existing customers with bonus points, free product, instant discounts and cashback on their purchases.
Social media
Social media marketing is the strategy of gaining huge traffic through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Connecting with your target audience is now easy with social channels. Create a page for your business and start promoting your products or services. It helps to build your brand, improve website traffic and increase conversions.
Publishing valuable and related content on your social channel is important to keep your followers engaged. Also, these platforms provide with analysis reports of user’s behaviour.
Run a contest
Conducting a contest is the best way to promote your brand. No matter whether you’re running a small organization or a large one. Contests can provide incentivized interaction. As a result, it can drive maximum traffic or visitors to your website.
Select the contest type, information and prize. There are numerous contest types available online. The popular contests are:
- Photo contest
- Instagram hashtag contest
- Coupon
- Vote contest
- Easy contest
- Referral promotion
- Video contest
Audience show much interest in contest details. Post the details on your website and social media platforms.
- Date and time of the contest
- Rules to run a contest
- Registration method (name, mobile number, email-id, etc)
- Where you will host the contest
The prize is important for any successful contest. You need to offer something big that can motivate your audience to make the effort to participate.
Industry partnerships
Many entrepreneurs say teaming up with industry-related business for joint projects is the best way to promote your business. Keep a note, your partner should not be direct competitors. Work on a joint project and grow together. This can be handled either offline through a special event, webinar or a promotional giveaway.
When you’re partnering with related industry, you can be introduced to a new set of targeted audience. The best thing is, people can afford these kinds of products.
Business cards
Business cards can stand as the first impression of your business. These cards play a major role while promoting your brand. If you don’t have a business card, then get it yourself. Attractive business card with relevant information can capture the prospects attention.
Business enhances brand credibility and establishes a strong brand. Business cards are a cost-effective approach for brands on a tight budget. On top of it, business cards are portable. You can carry them anywhere and anytime.
Email marketing
Email marketing is an effective marketing strategy for sending a business email to customers and prospects. It is a great way to earn new customers and get connected with existing customers. As per the market analysis, 99% of the customer’s check emails daily. A promotional email can convert business prospects into customers. Then transforms them from customers to loyal customers.
Create an enticing headline with clear description. Don’t forget to include CTA buttons in your mail.
Offer coupon codes
Offers, Coupon Codes, Deals, Vouchers and Cashback!!! People love hearing these words. Businesses are struggling hard while fixing the percentage of discount and cashback value.
Offering discount on every product can be a strong weapon to improve conversions, increase customer loyalty and acquisition.
Coupons and voucher codes are an effective method to attract new users. As per the analysis, 75% of people use coupon codes before placing a successful order. The best part of offering coupons and offers are “Return Visits”. Consider, if you offer a coupon on the next purchase. There may be a high probability of customer’s getting back to your website.
Final Thoughts
Promoting a business is like an ongoing challenging for every marketer. Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced business person, follow these amazing strategies. Implement one after the other and find new customers and get connected with them without spending a penny.
