Your Guide to Starting a Small Business: Marketing – Part I

Where would your company be without marketing? Think of a cold, dark cave somewhere in the middle of a deserted island. Now, I’m speaking metaphorically of course, but I think you get the point. If you don’t have some strategy for getting the word out about your business, how can anyone find and patronize you?

There are tons of marketing methods to choose from, and with the evolving nature of marketing strategy, it’s not feasible to cover all of them. Therefore, I present you with some of the more progressive marketing methods that we see making a big impact on companies today.

Content Marketing

The good news about content marketing is that it doesn’t require a big monetary investment as a TV commercial or billboard would. The downside is that it generally requires a fairly substantial investment of your time. Obviously as a new business owner, you’re probably strapped for both time and money, so you’ll have to determine what the best trade-off is for you.

The benefits of content marketing are plentiful. First and foremost, it allows you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Publishing content regularly demonstrates that you’re knowledgeable and that you care deeply about what you do. It won’t take long for people to take notice and gravitate towards your business. Secondly and thirdly, content helps with Search Engine Optimization and helps to drive traffic to your website. Here are a few different methods to help you employ content marketing within your new business marketing strategy.

Blogging

These days it seems like everyone has a blog, doesn’t it? Don’t let that deter you from starting your own, let that be your motivation to get on board. At this point, it’s almost expected that companies have a blog. Blogging is a great way to educate your clients and customers about your industry, keep them in the loop about what’s new at your company, and address things happening in the news that relate to your business.

E-Newsletters

E-newsletters provide you with a more direct way to reach out to your customers. Sending out a monthly newsletter is a great way to let people know what’s happening at your business and to promote any new products or specials. Plus, people have to voluntarily sign up to receive your newsletter, so (theoretically) the people receiving them actually want to receive them.

There are some excellent free tools available to help you put together professional-grade newsletters with speed and efficiency. The one that I have experience working with is Mailchimp (http://mailchimp NULL.com/). What I love about MailChimp is that it tracks statistics about open rates and click-through rates so you can see how responsive people are to your newsletters.

E-Books

To be clear, I’m not talking about sitting down and penning a novel here. It’s much simpler than that. For example, have you ever delivered a killer presentation or written a series on your blog that went over big with your audience? If you have, well then your e-book is already written… for the most part. You can re-format the blog posts or turn the presentation into a downloadable file to share with your clients. Of course, you’ll want to spruce it up a bit so that it flows nicely and reads like a book.

Social Media Marketing

So you think your customers like you? Well you know what they say, “it’s not official until it’s Facebook official.” Social media is more than just a way for you to boost your ego by collecting Facebook Likes and Twitter followers. It’s a way to connect with your customers and engage with them in a way like never before.

I’ve written about the benefits of incorporating social media into your marketing plan, and I would argue that social media has only grown even more relevant since then. Social media can be used to drive traffic to your website and blog, reward followers with special promotions, or even to provide customer service and answer questions. Which reminds me, if you’re not following us on Twitter (http://twitter NULL.com/#!/beperceived) or haven’t liked us on Facebook (http://www NULL.facebook NULL.com/beperceived), you’re going to want to go ahead and do that now.

Networking

Not all marketing requires a computer and internet connection. Good old fashioned rubbing elbows with people in the community goes a long way. In fact, a very high percentage of our business comes from referrals, and you can’t get many referrals without a little networking.

Now you can go with the more traditional networking events that are put on by your local chamber of commerce, or you can go the non-traditional rout and have some fun with it. For example, Chris plays in a tennis league that is mostly made up of older business men. Yes, he loves playing tennis, but it’s also a great way to make new connections without being overly “sales-y.” He also attends a lot of meet-ups where he meets other people in his line of work. That may seem a little counter-productive in terms of generating new business, but with plenty of work to go around and the unique skills set that each web developer possesses, there are always people looking to outsource or contract out a project to someone else.

Stay tuned next week for more great ideas on marketing tools to add to your bag of tricks. We’ll be discussing some of our favorites: Websites and print materials!