Every small business' goal is to make sure their products and services are visible to their target audience, and eventually converts to sales. In order to move the needle, you'll have to come up with a creative marketing strategy for your small business.
To achieve this goal, you will need to have your business in front of a well researched audience and offer something that can effectively solve a problem. The most rewarding thing any entrepreneur can do is setting up a small business plan that will differentiate from the competition and build value for the potential customer.
Your marketing plan should strategically be organized in a way to show you how to better reach your targeted customer through implementation.
Marketing is about mixing a combination of different activities and tasks that lead to your ultimate goal. You can promote your small business using unlimited resources but it's how you approach your marketing that matters the most.
With all the tactics and techniques I've used to gain more visibility while providing valuable content, here is my list of 60+ marketing ideas to help you improve your small business marketing strategy.
Start With Marketing Materials
- Create brochures and flyers for your off-line marketing campaigns.
- Make a business card that resurrects with your target audience.
- Create promotional products and share at your next networking event.
- Make sure to have a digital vision of all the off-line materials you create.
Tip: Checklist: Marketing materials for your small business
Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Create your social media pages for business
- Start a business blog on your site.
- Create a business twitter page.
- List your business on Google+ and create a "Google My Business" page.
- Structure you social page url names to match your business.
How To: Create a Social media marketing plan in 6 steps
Content Marketing Strategy
- Create press releases about your product or services. Submit your press release to high quality media channels.
- Write your own book and publish it online.
- Create and e-book on a specific subject area.
- Start a podcast and record regularly.
- Create interactive videos for your content.
- Make a video about your services or product.
See: Hidden cost of Content Marketing
Advanced Creative Marketing Strategy
- Cover your company vehicle with branding content.
- Be controversial about a product or service.
- Create and promote business ambassadors/affiliates.
- Rent a billboard and advertise your services or products.
More on: Advance creative marketing strategies
Build Business Relationships
- Join a professional organization.
- Sponsor a charity event your are passionate about.
- Signup for conferences.
- Volunteer at a local center.
- Become a mentor in your industry.
- Send cards to your clients.
- Build relationships with other business owners.
- Do local fundraising for a cause.
- Attend trade shows in your industry.
See: Ways to build a solid lasting business relationship
Email Marketing Strategy
- Start a weekly newsletter for your customers.
- Create lead captions and collect emails.
- Free downloads and gifts can help increase you email signup list.
- Make your emails interactive by adding social sharing, videos and audio to your content.
Tip: Data-driven guide to email marketing strategy
Start An Advertising Campaign
- Buy ad space on a high quality website that relates to your niche market.
- Advertise on Billboards.
- Put your ad in a local magazine or newspaper.
- Advertise on Facebook and do re-marketing.
- Broadcast an ad on the radio.
- Use local TV stations to run short ads.
- Advertise at bus stops
- Rent a venue and promote local events, placing banners in the room.
Tip: Paid Search campaigns and Advertising
Rewards, Coupons, Incentives and Contests
- Create a rewards program and offer discounts to your frequent buyers.
- Create coupon and have first time customer try your product or services.
- Create a weekly incentive program for customers who share your products and services.
- Give away free product samples.
- Create contests and provide gifts to the winner.
See: Prizes and rewards for a successful promotion
Get Marketing Help
- Get help with a salesperson.
- Employ or contract a professional copywriter.
- Get an Search engine optimization firm to boost your online rankings.
- Use a public relations professional to get the good word out.
- Contract or hire a marketing consultant for your daily task and strategies.
- Hire an intern to help with daily tasks while gaining experience.
Digital Marketing Strategy
- Use link building to increase your sites keyword rankings.
- Run ads using Google Adwords
- Track and analyze your sites reputation weekly.
- Do Vblogs and share on other video websites.
- Use google analytics to track all online activities.
- Make sure you are listed on the most quality online directories available.
- Run Bing Ads and show up in Bing search engine.
- Start building a local search strategy.
Tip: Digital marketing strategies that work
See: Powerful Startup Marketing Toolkit For Entrepreneurs
Divine Tumenta is an entrepreneur and professional digital marketing expert based in Los Angeles. He has worked in digital marketing for more than 8 years. He is currently founder and CEO of backlinkfy.com and a go to consultant for startups and small businesses in the USA.