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Much of America's backbone is made up of small business. These same
businesses are the "Mom and Pop"s with less than 15 employees. They face challenges of advertising and promoting their name, products or services in a much larger scale. Although I covered this topic in earlier blogs, I thought I would revisit this topic to help refresh some ideas for the small business on advertising and marketing. Remember, it is possible to compete with your larger counterparts if you just keep a few ideas in mind. Know where your place is Most small businesses think they need to advertise and promote themselves on a regional or state basis. You are killing yourself. Think within your town or city. Use local media to advertise. People know you here and you have stronger branding on a local scale. Social Media Take advantage of this. Incorporate your branding, marketing and advertising with social media. Start with the basics. Use Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. If you are clueless on how to do it, ask your kids, your employee's kids, slip them a few bucks and they will help you build it. They love this stuff and for some spending money, I am sure they will show you how to get them going. You don't need to hire a high cost marketing firm. (Sorry guys, I know I am biting my own hand but this is about small businesses who do not have the financial resources to compete) Save those email addresses Having marketing information to send out to your customers is important. When you get leads, or customers contact you about your services or products you need to build a data base. You can pay to get data information but again, I encourage you to start your own. Many times buying data base information has 80% outdated or lists of people who have nothing to do with what you are trying to promote. You get exactly that. Lists. People who have contacted you are interested in what you have to offer. Save it, build upon it and stay in touch with them. If you offer services lets say to professional organizations, many times you can go on the web and find listings in your area of people who belong to a group associated with their profession. Print out that information and you are on your way. It costs you nothing other than your time to look it up. That is something you can do at home or assign it to one of your employees. Your website How is your website? Do you even have one? Do you understand SEO? (Search Engine Optimization) You can put up a basic web site for nothing. There are many places including Google who offer free web sites. As far as building it, remember those kids who love Social Media? Yep, they know about web sites too. Co-op Dollars Many vendors or manufacturers offer money to resellers to promote their products. They will pay you via actual dollars or reimbursement after proof of performance (radio-tv) or tear sheet (print) to advertise. Wow, free cash! Next time your distributor or sales rep comes around, ask them about this. MDF Marketing development Funds is another free cash program that vendors offer. Similar to co-op but this is money you build up by buying their products. More latitude is often given with MDF as you can not only buy advertising by co-branding but you can do events, co-brand promotional material and more.Usually it is 1% of your purchases and you are responsible for reporting what you buy from them. It is well worth it. Ask your sales rep next time when asking about co-op dollars if they also offer a MDF program. Many times with MDF they will pay 100% of a marketing promotion whereas with co-op it is only a portion dedicated to their product. I hope this refresher on advertising and marketing on a budget has been a help to you. If you have your own success story, I would like to hear about it. Visit my last tab page here on my site and contact me. Comments are closed.
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