Big firms may spend a lot of money to promote their businesses. And they may use all types of offline and online media. But what about about small firms? Many don’t even use free information. They don’t read posts such as these. Marketing Tips for Small Businesses. FREE Marketing Planning Tools! Today we look at small business promotion: free resources.
Small Business Promotion: Free Resources
According to Webbiy, a Web site creator:
“Starting a business is very daunting. It becomes tougher when a firm works on a shoestring budget. Furthermore, promoting a firm among other established companies can be expensive. But it is possible even on a tight budget.”
“Before the Internet, small and mid-sized businesses had few ways to promote their goods or services. Banner ads and fliers can be expensive. To get the best return on investment, here are ways to promote your firm without spending a fortune.”
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Online Business Directories — “They allow users to search businesses in any niche. These sites are good places to start in launching an online presence. These sites have a wide range of audiences who are also potential customers for your business.”
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Local listing services — “Many small firms overlook this option even though it is free. And it an easy way to find customers searching in your area. Google Places makes it simple to locate your business on Google searches. Besides, Google Places shows your exact location mobile-friendly map. Yahoo Local and Bing Places for Business are also free to register.”
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Social Media — ” The world is using these social media sites. So make sure you create your business profiles and pages on them. Set up a personal and company profile on LinkedIn. Post offers on your Facebook page. And have a direct channel on Twitter.”
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Content Promotion Sites — “Submit articles on topics your customers are interested in. This includes sites like Ezinearticles, HubPages, and Articlesbase. They let you add backlinks to your Web site to give you traffic.”
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Press Release Web Sites — “Always shoot off a press release and submit it to popular sites like PRLog and Free Press Release every time you do something newsworthy. There are many other sites where you can make an impact like Open PR and 24-7 PressRelease.”
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Blog — “Blogs are a perfect way to connect with customers directly and get your name out there. The key to successful blogging is updating as often as you can.”
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Online Communities — “Every niche has an online community. Join it and contribute actively. These communities are also free places to promote your business. They let you add links to your signature or mention firm when the need arises.”
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For the small firm, I think it is better to do some promotions that are little different to the big company. Because when both of you do promotion at the same time, it’s easier for customer to be attracted by the promotion made by big company because it has enough budget to do an attractive promotion.
There is no doubt that promotion plays a significant role in small firm’s business. However, i do not think this is the only way in competition. If positioning as a high or luxury level firm in the future, small business firm can ‘t make promotion as its usual decision since it really hurt brand value initially.
Compare with many big business, small business may not have enough budge spend on marketing their brand or doing advertisement. It is a great way using online free resources to promotion a small business. In today’s world, internet is well developed and already became an important part of our life. By looking up the social media everyday, we can found many informations. From example, a small business like a local restaurant. It can create a website and post their menus on their website. This restaurant can using different social media to spread their informations.
In this so-called information explosion age, it is still not easy for small business to stand out through social network. If the business keep posting articles or information on the website mentioned above, the outcome may not be notable. Haier impressed me and set a good example. Haier has shown up in every hot post and commented famous celebrities. Millennials who didn’t know this old brand got to know it. Haier renew itself and expose itself to so many people. Even though it is not a small business, but the promotion method Haier used is definitely useful with limit budget.
Many small firms do not take advantage of these free marketing resources. Big firms have the resources to pay for advertisements and for managing marketing sites and social media and I think the lack of resources in a smaller company is what deters them from even attempting to create a marketing strategy. Social media is probably the easiest way to market a small firm, and to reach a certain target market. Again, I think the time it would take for a business owner or manager to manage the social media account or the thought of paying someone to do it for them is a deterrent despite that the company would gain more customers.
Creativity is a free and convenient resource. If small firms tried thinking a bit out of the ordinary, there is so reason why they would have to resort devoting a majority of their budget to marketing and promotion. I’d like to go into creative consulting when I’m out of school so I can help businesses save money and time in a new and refreshing way that actually attracts attention to their purpose.
Depending on who you are trying to market towards, I believe that only some of these free resources are beneficial. For example, if you are trying to market towards senior citizens, chances are, they are not browsing the internet regularly to read blogs and scroll through social media. Many older people are likely to read through news papers and magazines. Though, if you are trying to target a younger crowd, blogs and social media would be a highly effective way to do it, because a majority of the younger population are online in some way, shape, or form. Small businesses should definitely take advantage of those free resources, because any type of promotion is good promotion.
Good observations
I work at this hamburger place called All American and they’re a small business. One store to be exact. They could expand but choose not to and its always confused me. Brand recognition plays a big role in this. A sizable amount of people know of this burger place on Long Island. With the help of the internet and some promotion. All American has the potential to be the next big franchise of tomorrow.
These are some really interesting ways of promotion that previously I had no knowledge about. As I’m currently working with a grass roots tutoring company to work on their overall image and some public relations aspects of their business, this was very useful and I may implement some of the methods into my own work.