Across the last 6 months I have worked with a number of small businesses to help them market online. Given the lockdown which was imposed on so many of us, it meant that digital marketing was going to become a great way to save so many businesses. Take a client that I had, for Rick Andreoli Montreal was the only place where he sold his pizza dough and cooking ingredients, yet once the store was forced to close, he lost access to the market. We were able to take him online where his customers could find him, and the business did great as a result.
Small businesses have to invest some money in digital marketing, and here is where to start.
Social Media
Whilst it is true that you can advertise on social media for free, simply by setting up a business page and then using that to share content and ads, the reach you get is never guaranteed. There is a algorithm which manages how wide reaching your posts are, and it is very difficult to work out. For this reason it makes much more sense to pay for ads on social media. Not only can you change the amount which you want to spend, making it easy to manage a budget, but you can also aim those ads at your target audience.
Promotional Marketing
This isn’t a new form of marketing but through the digital marketing sphere it has changed. Promotional marketing is about offering a great deal to entice a customer to buy from you, at which point they are wowed by your service and your products, and they come back next time at full price. In the modern age the best way to do this is to use a coupon site, which offer great promotions to their users. In many cases you can simply strip the profit off a product and offer that as the promotion, a great way to bring customers in.
Email Marketing
A great strategy which we did with Rick’s business was to contact his customers via email. Rick’s company had been saving email addresses from the customers who have ordered from him before, and so we set up a system whereby he could email his customers all at once, let them know that the business was thinking about them during the lockdown and offering a small incentive for them to make an order. Email marketing is not what it used to be but it still offers a great option for small businesses which are looking at keeping in touch with their customers and gaining their trust so that they become loyal customers in the future.
These are three very simple, yet very effective ways in which a small business can market itself. As more money comes in then you can of course ramp up marketing spending, for now, these are three budget friendly and easy ways to market yourself, why not give them a try?
