startup marketing techniques for new businesses.
When you’ve set up your business, and everything seems to be in place, the next step is marketing. Taking your product to its potential consumers.
That’s a big challenge for many since not every entrepreneur comes from a marketing background.
Sometimes, even marketing majors may find marketing in practicality is nothing like what they’ve studied in the textbooks.
So, has your marketing plan proved disappointing so far?
Don’t worry!
Below are the top SIX marketing techniques you can use to quickly gain MAXIMUM publicity for your business. If you want to learn more about scaling an already existing business, we have an article for that in our blog section.
Stick around and have a read.
1) Start a Referral Program.
Referral marketing is a great way to get lots of word-of-mouth publicity.
Most customers feel excited about referral programs since they can earn discounts and gifts without making much effort, but as long as you aren’t spammy or offering something that doesn’t provide value to someone; this is a viable path for income, even if it isn’t something we do at Oi.
Also, a recent survey showed that about 92% of people trust personal recommendations.
So, yeah, think about introducing a referral program!
2) Create a Website or SM Page.
If you don’t have a website, Google Business Profile or social media page for your business, well, let’s face it, you’re doomed.
It is the internet era, and everything is just one click away.
And if your business is not, there’s a problem for you. Work on setting a good, responsive website (or a social media page) for your brand because you can’t survive without one these days.
We are partial to WordPress for websites, but there are also many other backends that exist, and some that are really easy to setup such as Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc… they just suffer in the SEO world, which leads us into our next section.
3) Tap Into the Power of SEO.
So, once you have an internet presence, you can use the power of SEO to help you rank on Google.
What’s SEO?
Search Engine Optimization.
So, what happens is, if you own a website, and it’s well-optimized according to the Google algorithms, it’ll get ranked on the top pages of Google.
Ideally, anyone who searches for specfic keywords related to your business will land up on your website.
4) Hold a Contest.
Running a contest can be very effective, mainly if you give cash prizes.
The very sight of dollar bills will get people engaged with your concept.
And, don’t worry, the prize need not necessarily be 1000s of dollars.
As little as $50 per winner can work pretty well for you!
5) Flyers and Posters Still Work.
Yeah, they still do.
But, for this marketing strategy, you will require an expert copywriter.
You can use segmentation, target the areas where you think most of your potential customers are, and bombard them with your flyers and posters.
But, wait!
If you want a flooding response, the ads should contain some promise of free coupons, gifts or freebies – otherwise, it will be hard to generate a lead without an incentive.
6) Try Email Marketing.
According to a survey in 2019, about 3.9 billion people worldwide used email for communication.
And the figure is going to grow to 4.3 billion in 2023.
So, with almost half of the world’s population using electronic mail, this is a GREAT platform to talk about your business.
But, you’ll need an email marketing expert for your campaign.
Hire someone with proven expertise because millions of emails get labelled as spam and go straight to the trash every year.
And you certainly don’t want your emails to share the same fate, do you?
Conclusion.
So, that’s about it.
The above six techniques are easy to use, cheap and still very effective.
You can use one, two, three, or all of the above techniques – that’s very much up to you.
Once the money starts rolling in, you can go for bigger marketing plans.
For now, all the very best! And for a more thorough breakdown of these ideas visit our Marketing Your Business in Canada article.