You have easier ways of building your small business than you probably think you do. You have a base of existing customers, and that represents easier opportunities for growth. You will be able to spend more money and time finding new customers.
If you are an offline business, then you can gain increase exposure through the different places formats that are available. Practically every company knows about Google Places, but what many aren't aware of is that there are other search engines that have similar listings. Yahoo and Bing both feature listings for local businesses and they're not the only ones because some of the big secondary search engines also do it. Make sure your business has a presence on all of them and get your site SEO ready for searches run locally. Getting listed in business directories that are specific to each state is also a good approach. In the worst case, you'll have to list in a business directory from your neighboring state but generally all states have them. The idea is to make sure you cover your entire state.
You can find lots of ideas for marketing your business that you are unlikely to actually use. A comprehensive search using Google will yield tons of ideas many of which are effective. Then you can move to paid-for content from reliable and trusted sources.
You can employ a direct mail campaign on a more limited level, even if you haven't taken advantage of these types of campaigns before. You will find people will take notice of you because postcard mailings are still effective. The goal with postcards is to ensure your customers don't forget you so make sure your message is relatively short. There are many tactics postcards are good for but you want to avoid direct, hard-selling as it will only backfire. You can use postcards to deliver a short preselling message to warm up prospects in a two-step marketing strategy. The idea is to entice people to visit your website or convince them to come to your place of business. You need to track everything and you can do it by creating a sub-directory with a simple name people will remember that doesn't complicate the URL too much.
Put together a marketing plan if you haven't done so already--you don't have to make it intricate or complicated. In your plan, you can include all of the different projects you want to take on during the year so that you'll always know what it is that you should be doing to expand your marketing reach. Don't forget that it is incredibly common to happen across new ideas and inspirations as you work.
If you are an offline business, then you can gain increase exposure through the different places formats that are available. Practically every company knows about Google Places, but what many aren't aware of is that there are other search engines that have similar listings. Yahoo and Bing both feature listings for local businesses and they're not the only ones because some of the big secondary search engines also do it. Make sure your business has a presence on all of them and get your site SEO ready for searches run locally. Getting listed in business directories that are specific to each state is also a good approach. In the worst case, you'll have to list in a business directory from your neighboring state but generally all states have them. The idea is to make sure you cover your entire state.
You can find lots of ideas for marketing your business that you are unlikely to actually use. A comprehensive search using Google will yield tons of ideas many of which are effective. Then you can move to paid-for content from reliable and trusted sources.
You can employ a direct mail campaign on a more limited level, even if you haven't taken advantage of these types of campaigns before. You will find people will take notice of you because postcard mailings are still effective. The goal with postcards is to ensure your customers don't forget you so make sure your message is relatively short. There are many tactics postcards are good for but you want to avoid direct, hard-selling as it will only backfire. You can use postcards to deliver a short preselling message to warm up prospects in a two-step marketing strategy. The idea is to entice people to visit your website or convince them to come to your place of business. You need to track everything and you can do it by creating a sub-directory with a simple name people will remember that doesn't complicate the URL too much.
Put together a marketing plan if you haven't done so already--you don't have to make it intricate or complicated. In your plan, you can include all of the different projects you want to take on during the year so that you'll always know what it is that you should be doing to expand your marketing reach. Don't forget that it is incredibly common to happen across new ideas and inspirations as you work.
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