There are so many ways you can market your small business: social media, email, paid advertising (and more!). Having the right strategy to communicate and promote your business is essential, and choosing which advertising avenues to pursue can be super helpful!
Let’s take a look at these six different types of ways you can market for your small business.
Traditional Media
This means going with the classics: paying to get your business out there on a TV, radio, or print station. This could also include billboard advertisements. Since you are paying to get your ad out there, you have complete say over the message you’re presenting. Keep in mind that traditional media can be hard to measure success since there are no direct analytics involved. Meaning, you can’t tell if a radio ad led someone to call your business or purchase from your website unless they explicitly tell you that’s how they heard about your business.
Personalized Marketing
This strategy includes using historical data of your customers to create a more customized experience. Because you know a person’s preference, you can filter certain content and target other areas to influence your customer.
Data about your customers can easily be comprised in to two buckets: zero party data, this is data that a customer voluntarily gives you – their name, their email, their birthday. And first party data, this is data that you know about them through their habits within your business, like their website behaviors.
Some ways to capitalize on personalized marketing:
- Send emails to people on or around their birthday offering them a discount or a free item
- Use it to make suggestions for another purchase.
- Address people by name on marketing emails.
- Send them an email on the anniversary of their first purchase thanking them for being a customer.
Public Relations
Public relations (PR) marketing is a strategy where you partner with a news source to generate buzz about your business. The difference between this and traditional media is that you do not pay for PR; however, this limits your control over the message. PR marketing is generally used with a new product launch, announcing an expansion, or just to generally increase brand awareness.
Partner Marketing
This is when your business works with another company or person to create one cohesive message. For example, GoPro and Red Bull have established themselves as lifestyle brands, where their shared values make them a perfect pair for adventurous pieces of advertising.
Influencer marketing is also a great example of partner marketing.
Being a small business, you probably do not have a large budget for influencer marketing, but you could partner with other like-minded small businesses.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing encompasses a lot of digital strategies, but includes search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing. I
(Search engine marketing means utilizing online paid advertisements to promote your business, and it can also include organic SEO strategies. Content and social media marketing involve creating digital content to share online and get customers to interact with your brand more frequently. Affiliate marketing means your company pays commission to an external website for sales generated from their website referrals.)
In a world where we live on our phones and social media it’s easy to gravitate towards utilizing only social media to market your business. While social media can be highly effective, we never like to put all of our eggs in one basket, so a combination of multiple marketing methods is always a good idea.
Event Marketing
Meeting people face to face. You can hold an experiential event to get to know your customers and promote your product, like a pop-up, or you can try interactive marketing, like hosting a game to win a giveaway.
All of these are good strategies to increase brand awareness and promote your product. Give them a try and find which one(s) works best for you!