Ways To Promote Your Business
Startups face many big challenges before they can find a foothold for themselves in the market. They have to compete with established brands and yet make a space for themselves. If this was not tough enough, there comes the added cost of advertising and marketing. However, these are critical to establishing a brand and making it a success. Here are some easy and low cost ideas to remote your startup.
Referrals
Referrals have always been a great way of improving your business. One happy customer referring another is the best way to get a positive image for your startup and also increase sales. You could offer customers a discount or a gift when they refer someone and that person buys your product or service.
Social Media
Unlike mainstream media, social media costs next to nothing to promote your products. You can post updates n Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. This will help you build a strong community and create offers on a regular basis. Keep your audience engaged with contests, interesting news about products or related issues, updates and so on.
Discount Coupons
Who does not like a chance to save some money? Providing discount coupons can attract many new customers. Research has revealed that many will go out of their way to use their coupon. This will help you rapidly expand your customer base and increase brand awareness. You will also be able to measure the efficacy of this method.
Name Board Promotion
We don’t even know if you have woken up to this kind of advertising yet. Your name board is a simple and highly cost-effective piece of brand merchandise. Don’t just put your brand name there, add a tagline elaborating your brand promise or defining what the brand is. Don’t make your board ordinary, make it stand out. Go with LED lighting. This is not only durable; it also looks very attractive at night.
Personal Branding
Promote your expertise. Make videos that are useful and informative not just about your product but about the industry as well. For instance, if you are a seasoned professional in the field of selling lights, do educate the customer on things like how to choose a light for a specific room or for a need. Such videos have the likelihood of getting a better viewership than blatant advertising. This kind of sharing expertise also promotes you as an expert in the industry.
Could You Get A High Profile Interview?
If you could manage to get a high profile person in your industry interviewed and promote this on social media, this will give you plenty of traffic. Traffic run for such searches is high and this can draw plenty of attention to our business. You can also run a live chat or throw a Twitter party, it all works towards grabbing eyeballs.
Network
Networking is one of the best ways to promote your business and generate new ideas. Make it a point to attend conferences and symposiums in your industry. You will meet your peers and will get to understand the competition better as well. You are also likely to meet prospective customers when you go to general networking events such as exhibitions or those with topics such as entrepreneurship, motivational talks and so on.
Contests
Keep your prospects and customers engaged by running different kinds of contests. You can have small giveaways of your products or related to them with some branding on them. This will create a lively interaction and also help in building brand awareness and recall. You can even run different types of contests online and offline.
Testimonials
A happy customer is your best advertisement. Ask your customers for testimonials; let them express what they feel about your product and how they have benefitted. They could write it down or even better you could shoot a video of theirs that can be uploaded to your website and on social media. The voice of your customers is one that will ring true.
Collaborate
Collaborations are advantageous on diverse fronts. You need to identify a group of synergistic, non-competitive businesses in your area and then cross-promote. For example, if you are a socks brand, you can promote your brand along with a shoe brand. This would work well and the collaboration would not seem odd. Collaboration can bring you increases reach at a lower cost.
Give Away Samples
If your product is not a very expensive one and one that would be better understood through the experience, sampling would work. Sampling is ideal for food products, beauty products, wellness products and so on. Samples can be given away at events or on request from your site.
Customer feedback
This is all about collecting feedback from different sections of the targeted audience using various means. This helps to improve products and services offered.
