Marketing a small business is totally different than marketing a large business.  When you are marketing a large business you have a lot more money to go towards your marketing budget.  If something does not quite work it is not good, but it does not hurt nearly as much as when you are marketing a small business.

There are many strategies to marketing a small business, some of these are more expensive than others and some might be more or less effective for your business.  You need to test everything that you do so that you know if you are getting positive results.  Sorry to say but there is no way of saying to you exactly what method will work for you and your company.

Marketing A Small Business with Cold Calling

I know, we all dislike cold calling, but this is the fastest way to get business.  If you need business tomorrow get on the phone today.  This works better if you have a product or service that you are selling to a business rather than a consumer.  Businesses do get calls everyday and really do not like getting calls, but if you truly can save them money or enhance their business in some way they will listen.  And if you have something that they can use on a regular basis you will have a customer for a very long time.  Just one successful call can give you 1 to 40 hours of work per week.  Of course that works for businesses that are in the service or construction industries like house cleaners, plumbers, framers, etc…

Another way to do cold calling is to go door to door introducing yourself.  This does not give you as fast of results as phoning businesses that can use your services on a regular basis, but this still works.  If you just opened a hair salon, investment company, restaurant or other similar business you as the owner can go out and meet the people that live in your neighborhood.  To enhance this a little bit you should have a coupon or gift certificate you can give to them to redeem at some point in the future.  Use a call to action like limited to the first 100 clients, or only good for this month.  This will help people take action on your offer, providing the offer works for them.

Marketing A Small Business with Postcards or Flyers

Postcards and flyers are a great way to market a small business.  This method works as long as you do everything right.  Create a killer headline that leads into the ad.  Give testimonials of your work and/or products.  Guarantee your products and services, and then give your offer.  This might be a discount for the first 100 clients or a discount for a certain period of time.  Then throw in another bonus in the PS, something like even better if you are one of the first 25 callers I will do this.  This should get people calling.

There is three ways of getting your postcards and flyers to the potential client.  You can deliver the message yourself door to door.  You can have the post office deliver in bulk mail, or you can use a flyer delivery service.  I found that delivering the postcard myself brought in the best results as far as a percentage goes, but as I got busier I no longer had time to do this myself.

Marketing a Small Business with a Website

Every business needs a website of some kind.  If you do not have the funding to allow for you to have someone build you a website at first then you can create a few pages yourself or join my mailing list and I will show you exactly how you can build a website in very little time.

Once you have a website you need to market the site.  You can do this by paying for ads on the search engines or on Facebook, and speaking of Facebook, you need to create a page for your business as well.  Don’t worry you don’t need a lot of fancy graphics if you don’t have the resources.  If however you have some cash you can hire someone to build you a custom page.  Other ways to get potential clients to your website or web pages is through search engine optimization.  That is outside of the scope of this article but again if you join my mailing list you will get my report on search engine optimization for small business.

Marketing a Small Business With the Yellow Pages

What? The yellow pages?  Yes, the yellow pages can still bring in a lot of clients for you.  Not sure how long this will go on for, but what you should do in check your local yellow pages and see how many people in your industry are advertising there.  If there is still quite a few businesses then most likely there is still an opportunity for you to get leads from that medium.  I don’t think I would go with a full page ad anymore, in fact I would probably go with an ad that is one or two sizes smaller than the largest ad in the book now.  This way you can test to see if it works for you without spending a lot of money.  Ten years ago I would have said to put in an ad the same size or larger than the largest ad, but now the person who has the largest ad might now be tracking their marketing.  Which means they might be throwing their money away on an ad that worked great 5 years ago for them.  Try it if you have the funds, but make sure you use a great headline that grabs the attention of the reader.  And in this case you know the reader is looking for someone in your industry to help them with their needs and wants.  Why else would they be there?  Unlike other advertising that you have to grab their attention away from something else that they are doing, like TV, magazines, or newspaper display ads.

Marketing a Small Business with Direct Mail

Direct mail for marketing a small business can be very successful.  When using direct mail the best way to be successful is to buy a list of your target market.  There is many different lists out there to buy.  In fact no matter what kind of business you have I would think there is a list to accommodate you.  Once you have a list you can mail to that list once, so you better make it good.  To make it good you will need to write a great sales letter.  Much more than the little pointers I have given you so far.  In my weekly newsletter I talk a lot about subjects like creating a killer headline, writing copy that sells, marketing a website or just a single webpage, and much more, you can join by signing up on the right hand side.

Marketing a Small Business with Email

Just like using direct mail you can do something different buy emailing your target market.  The difference is marketing with email cannot just be a sales letter that you hope will get you business.  When you are marketing with email you need to get people onto your email list and send them lots of good free information.  In each email you can give a little bit of information about your business, but 90% of the message better be for them to learn about something that will benefit them.  If you are a mechanic then each week when you send out an email you had better explain the benefits of something to do with the readers car.  Maybe stay up on the latest trends and facts about cars that you can put together that will help your clients in some way.  If you are a hairdresser send out emails that inform your readers about the important areas to do with hair.  I am grasping at straws here, lol, obviously I am not a mechanic or a hairdresser, but the field that you are in will have lots of different things that you can help people with.  At some point some of those people will use you, most won’t, but that is ok.  None of us can possibly service absolutely everybody.

Other articles that will help you in your marketing are marketing a business and marketing for a small business

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Thanks,
Kelly

Marketing a Small Business