As all of us small business owners know, marketing need not be expensive, but it does take some time and effort. About 6 weeks ago, I signed up for yet another great webinar sponsored by the American Marketing Association called 10 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Business. It was so packed with great information that it’s going to take me two blog posts to write about what was included.
Before I share what I learned, keep in mind this standard rule of thumb when marketing your business: 80% of the information you publish should be valuable content, while 20% can be pure promotion.
10. Tie Your Company’s Promotions Into Daily or Monthly Events
Ever hear of Chase’s Calendar of Events? It is really cool and a very useful tool for marketers. For 42 years, they’ve been publishing a yearly calendar that lists everything from celebrity birthdays to monthly celebrations (think National Black History Month). From the truly obscure (July 1—the day I’m writing this post—is Midyear Day in Thailand) to the historic (the Battle of Gettysburg took place on July1 in 1863), there are several items listed every day of the year that, if you get creative and think ahead, you could base a promotion on.
9. Tap Into Your Network
The companies and people you work with are great sources of information and shouldn’t be ignored. Share leads with partners and solicit feedback from vendors, especially for new products or services. Don’t forget your customers, either. Use feedback from them as the basis for a research study. Publish and share the study with them (and potential customers).
8. Syndicate Your Content
Blog syndication is really underutilized, so tap into it. (Syndication means something is published in more than one place—think advice columns that appear in newspapers nationwide.) First get a Creative Commons license to ensure you retain the copyright of your content when it is re-published. Then look up blogs where the subject you want to write about fits in and that also accept non-original content.
7. Get Yourself Some User-Generated Content
Adding user-generated content to your website takes some organizing but is a relatively easy way to goose inbound marketing. Three ideas: Ask vendors, customers, and partners to guest blog for you. Add a forum to your website; topics could include help/support, news, info, industry gossip, product or service ideas, etc. Put together a blog series written by experts in your field.
6. Don’t Forget Outbound Marketing
Posting on other sites is important, too. Write a review on Amazon.com for a book written about your industry, answer questions related to your field on LinkedIn, post on companies’ Facebook walls, and be sure to share all of the content you are creating on social media sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Continue reading by checking out the next blog post on this topic here.
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