Building your own brand and making your company stand out from the competition might seem like an impossible task, especially if your business is just starting. However, this is certainly not impossible, and don’t forget that all major global companies once started as small business projects that had the right amount of drive, passion and marketing skills. So, if you too are looking for ways to promote your business at the moment, here are some ideas that might help you do that more effectively than ever.
1. Make a Website Already
Making a website used to be a hard, expensive and time-consuming task back in the day, but now it’s easier than ever. You literally just need a couple of dollars, a few good ideas and about fifteen minutes of your time, to get a basic website up and running. This is a vital part of your entire promotional strategy since websites are more important than people generally realize – from making a name for yourself to keeping track of your visitors, you can’t even start marketing your business without a proper website.
These days if you are a small business without a website many customers don’t even take you seriously. New customers no longer look in the “Yellow Pages” they look online once they’ve found you they might check out your ratings on a site like Yelp. Existing customers check your website for things like the hours you are open, your exact address, your phone number (although if you answer all of the Frequently Asked Questions on an FAQ page you won’t have to answer them on the phone over and over). You have created an FAQ page right? Don’t forget to submit your site to the search engines so they can start indexing your site.
A professional looking website allows you to easily connect with your clients and users and show them how much you appreciate their feedback. Then you can easily turn followers and subscribers into paying customers. Unfortunately, unless you are going for the “small shop” super personalized look, an amateurish looking website might actually do more harm than good. If you already have a website and it isn’t performing as well as you think it should you can contact the professionals at Design Synergy and get a website audit. As professional marketers, web designers and Social media managers, Design Synergy can help you tweak your site to present the image you want and help you expand your reach.
Once your website is live and starts gaining attention, it’s time for part two of your plan to dominate the world of business in your area – turning to social media. Basically, all the advantages of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest are offering can help you expand your social media presence.
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2. Rely on Professionals
Handling the job yourself may be “Penny Wise” when you are first getting started, but if you want to move forward and develop a marketing strategy that will skyrocket your business, you’re going to have to talk to a few people who know what they’re doing. Performing some of the things on your own is quite all right, but doing literally everything alone is one of the biggest mistakes you could make, especially as we said when it comes to designing your web and Social Media presence.
3. Hand out business cards
You know those people who hand their business cards to everyone they meet with? Well, those guys may be boring and look rather silly, but that strategy is actually working quite nicely for them – after all, these are the guys you contact whenever you need something! You don’t have to go all Mark Zuckerberg on your friends and tell them you’re the CEO, but try to become the person everyone’s going to remember. Go to your printer’s, make a sweet deal with them and walk out with enough business cards to hand out to every person you meet. You never know which one of them is going to become your next big investor.
4. Show your appreciation
Being constantly connected with your users and clients is amazing, but encouraging them to engage with you and share their thoughts on your company is even better. One of the best ways to do so is by handing out gifts and rewarding your most loyal customers every once in a while. Give them coupons, discounts and special offers as frequently as you can, such as a discount for each customer who shows you that they’ve “Checked In on Facebook” while in your business and you’ll share your message throughout the community more easily than you could’ve imagined. Keep in mind that this is just one of many word-of-mouth marketing techniques that can do wonders for your company and it actually won’t even cost you a lot in the long run!
Of course, these are just a few of the many effective ways to promote and market your company. Some of the other great ways to do so include boosting posts on social media, investing in an expensive marketing campaign on TV and radio, getting interested in guerilla marketing, targeting potential customers and clients via e-mail, offering free stuff to first-time buyers and starting a blog where you can share your experiences and advertise your products and services.
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