There is much more to a marketing campaign than simple advertising. If you don’t have a bottomless marketing budget, success with creating awareness and positive sentiment around your brand can come down to knowing your customers, building buzz and making a personal connection. It can take a change of attitude to do this. If you have no idea where to start, here are tips.
Get on social media
From Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Yelp, social media offers small businesses a powerful way to get in touch with the millions of people on their platforms, and they charge nothing for it. All you need to do is to figure out what to say. While it can be expensive to create the content that you need to truly engage your customer base and to set up lively conversations with them, it can be worth the investment. When you use traditional advertising, it can be hard to gain any insight into how well you’re doing. On social media, however, you have your customer base actually speaking to you. You get tremendous insight into how you’re doing.
Build out your database of customer profiles
The more information you have on your database, the more relevant your marketing efforts will be. You can send out marketing emails for products that are likely to interest them, notify them about sales that they might like, and design better products. It isn’t easy to build out a database of your customers, however. If you do have a database, it’s likely to have nothing more than their names, email IDs and phone numbers.
If you’re serious about collecting information, you need to make a real effort and commit to a detailed survey. It could have a giveaway attached to encourage participation. According to Dynamic Gift of Canada (dynamicgift.ca/promotional-bags-satchels), a major in the promotional gifting space, you need to make sure that the gift that you offer is adequate for a number of effort participants will need to spend filling out your survey. The gift also needs to be affordable to you, when you consider the value of the information that you hope to collect.
Start a retweet campaign
If your customer base consists mainly of the under-40 set, many of them may have an interest in Twitter, and will probably respond to a campaign on this medium. The idea is to create and share interesting and valuable content with the name of your business attached.
When you tweet it out to your mailing list, you may hit the jackpot at some point. Should one or two people on your mailing list be very popular, their retweets will get your message across to thousands, and you’ll suddenly find your campaign in high gear.
Designing a successful retweet campaign is no small matter, however. Unless you’re a celebrity, you can only expect people to think of retweeting your message if there’s something truly interesting about it. A giveaway of quality digital content can be just the right thing. An e-book of custom content is a common choice and often works.
Get people to come to a live event
A live event could be an actual physical meeting with your customer base, or it could be a live-streamed online event. When people come to an event that you speak at, you can be sure that they have a high level of engagement, and you can use it to further open them to a deeper level of engagement.
Getting people to sign up to such an event, however, can take some skill. You should make the event itself worth their while with great speeches and information. This only works once they’re actually there. To get people to sign up to attend, it would make sense, again, to organize a giveaway. Everyone who signs up to attend should get something nice. Depending on the kind of audience that you target, it could be anything from a free month to an online magazine to passes to a paid, live-streamed event. You could get the creators of these products to subsidize your giveaway because it would be valuable to them to reach a wider audience.
Considering the fact that most small businesses do not really invest in their marketing, you may find it hard to believe that it could really be worthwhile to go to all this trouble. While it can be hard to measure the actual number of sales attributable to such efforts, it’s a challenge inherent in every kind of marketing. You can measure increased customer engagement, and that is usually all any business wants for its efforts.
