Online Marketing Tips

When you’re running a small, local business you always need to be creative and bring something new so the customers will come to instead of going to your competitors. This is why I like to play around and use little tricks to draw the attention onto my business. So instead of investing on a large advertisement campaign, especially if you’re in the beginning here are a few things I suggest you to try.

First you can create something that most people use and give it away for free. It can be a calendar, a key chain, a lighter or you can get more creative than this. As long as it has your logo on it, it doesn’t actually matter. People enjoy freebies and will surely remember you.

You can do the same thing online as well. Just instead of calendars offer for free a short e-book regarding some aspects related to your business or a how-to guide. If you’re good at what you do then writing a 20 pages e-book shouldn’t take you long. And this way you will also increase the list of your subscribers, because people will give you their emails to receive the book and you can keep sending them once in a while updates on your services.

Last, but not the least, because this is actually my favorite small strategy, you can create a customer loyalty program and each month spotlight one of your active customers as the customer of the month. Make sure to set up some nice, appealing benefits for these special customers of yours to keep everyone motivate to compete for the title.

You can’t run a successful, profitable business if you don’t know what happens around you. Knowing who your competitors are and what strategies they are using is vital if you want to succeed. Now it’s easy to do so thanks to the online resources you have at your disposal. Any competition worth looking into should have at least a website and a social profile.

Don’t tell anyone, but one of my favorite things in the world is to look up the names of my competitors and see how much background information I can gather on them.

First thing you need to do is search on Google the same keywords that you are targeting and see which are the first 5-6 sites that show up. Considering you are running a small business you might be lucky enough not to have any strong competitors but you can’t rely on that. Now, open those sites and check them out to see if they are indeed your competitors. Look at the content of the website and its design and take note on the things you like and dislike.

After you have seen the contents it’s time to check out their contact information. See if they only have an email address and a phone number or they also use social platforms to put themselves out there. Assuming they at least use Facebook or Twitter, go and check out those profiles too. See how many friends, fans or followers they have, the latest messages posted on and from their accounts and any other type of info you might find.

Now you should have a pretty good idea against who you are competing and by trying to find their flaws you can improve your own services and make people choose your business over theirs.

When you are running a small business keeping in touch with your customers is essential.  And what better way to do so than using an email? Emails are one of the simplest methods of communication nowadays taking much less time than the old fashioned phone call.

First thing you are going to need is a reliable email marketing platform. One that has great customer support and lots of tutorials for beginners, one that can be fully automated if necessary and one that has a great analytics system that will help you improve your campaigns.  If you ask me then I would tell you that so far I have found only one platform that meets all three requirements, Aweber. I have tried others as well, but this one has by far the most reliable and efficient one.

Now it’s time to create your lists. These build up in time so don’t panic if in the beginning you’ll only have a couple of people subscribed. Make sure you keep separated your current customers from the potential ones because you’ll be sending them different types of emails.

For your customers you will want to send products and services updates or make them special offers. For your potential customers you will want to send relevant and informative contents to make them want to buy from you. Also, to make sure they don’t forget you, set up a newsletter and send it once or twice a month. Provide useful information and contents regarding the niche in which your business activates and your subscribers will appreciate it.

And make sure you don’t forget to send nice, thoughtful messages around the important holidays! People love this kind of stuff.

A good service for email marketing, that I use myself is Aweber.

If you’re running a small, local business then your safest bet to bring in new customers is the newspaper advertisements. Even though many voices say that nowadays people don’t read newspapers anymore and they get all the information they need online I dare to contradict them.  It’s true, Internet Marketing is in most of the cases more effective but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use all marketing resources you have at hand.

First thing you need to pick a newspaper. My advice: don’t choose a national one thinking it has more readers and you’ll get more exposure, choose one or two local ones because these are the ones have the potential to generate you customers because they are more targeted. People are more interested in reading the local news and the classifieds/ads sections then reading about world wide news.

Depending on your budget you can choose how you want to promote your business. You can buy a larger advertisement space and make sure your ad and business stand out, but you have to be ready to pay more. But considering the fact that we are talking about a local newspaper the fees shouldn’t be very high.

You can also place an ad in the classified section describing the services or goods you are offering. This option is very cheap and if you see good results then you can scale it up and buy advertisement space.

From my point of view newspaper marketing is an old school method that still brings in good results, especially for local businesses. Combine this with an online marketing strategy as well and your business will never run out of fresh customers.

Web marketing is a bit different from traditional offline marketing, but when you consider the huge potential it has and the exposure you’ll be benefiting from I think you’ll agree with me that it’s essential to set up at least one Internet marketing campaign.

First thing you need to do is create a search engine optimized website for your business. Make sure to pick the right, relevant keywords and spread them throughout the contents of the site. This way search engines will find you faster. My advice: unless you have strong SEO skills hire someone to this task. Tell him how you want it to look like, what is your business all about and let him take care of the rest.

As soon as your site is properly optimized search engines will start finding it. People looking for your specific, targeted keywords will have access to your website and if they like what they see then you’ll get yourself new customers. If your SEO is done correctly then your site should show up in the first 10 results of a search, placing you on the first page of any search engine and so giving you more exposure. And while many think Google is the only one that matters I can tell you for sure that Yahoo or Bing are quite powerful as well.

Besides SEO, here is another one of my favorite techniques to bring in new visitors: social networking. Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn are only a few of the places where you can advertise. Create yourself a steady fan base because more people giving you positive feedback on the services your business is offering only means more exposure and new potential clients coming your way.