As small business owners, we seek ways to stretch our marketing dollars. In a competitive landscape, finding avenues to stand out and demonstrate what makes you uniquely fit to serve your clients can be challenging.
You may not realize, however, that every small business has a set of tools that can significantly enhance its reach and impact while not increasing its marketing budget. These are best implemented as complementary tools to your existing strategy, not to supplant them. Think of these as boosters in your marketing power smoothie- practices that are both good habits and that amplify the messaging to your audience.
Over the next weeks, we will explore the following five ways to amplify your brand on a budget:
- Community investment: Regardless of where your business is physically located, whether you are brick-and-mortar or online, or if you are a goods or services entity, you have a community surrounding your business if it is successful. Your audience and your clients are your community. Investing in your community does not necessarily mean donating cash to worthy causes, though it can. Business owners can invest in their community by first modeling a lifestyle of giving. When the boss is taking the afternoon off to prepare sandwiches for a food truck run, your employees take note and, especially if encouraged and assured time off, will follow suit. When a business brings its workforce to a worthy cause, everyone wins. Brands that consistently show up in their community via a few great causes build recognition, favor, and trust in their communities. Nothing is more valuable for a brand than to be known, liked, and trusted. Not only is community involvement good for our brands, but it’s also good for our world.
- Be a cheerleader and genuine friend for your clients: Drawing from our community investment tip, develop a habit of expressing joy for your community of current and past clients. Follow their social media accounts, like their posts, and comment on their achievements. A prior client just launched a new product? Fantastic- congratulate them, and let their audience know you’ll be trying it out soon! Be a cheerleader for your village, and your village will cheer you on in return.
- Keep up a regular blog: It’s proven science that brands that maintain a blog with factual information or provoking ideas that engage their audience to enjoy up to four times the reach than brands that do not maintain a blog. You are in business because you know how to do something very well. Talk about what you do, why you do it, and how you do it. If you are an eco-friendly dry cleaning business, write a blog post on your chemical choices and why those decisions were important to you. If you own a travel agency, post about your or your client’s travels (with permission, of course). Research continues to demonstrate that people prioritize a personal account of a product or service over a static ad by leaps and bounds. We are hard-wired to take in stories. Blogs are a way of telling our story about our brand. Isn’t it amazing that we can publish a story about our brand with a few clicks of a keyboard? Blogs are powerful for brands, and we should utilize them to the fullest.
- Wear your promotional clothing: We aren’t just saying this because we happen to create incredibly effective promotional products…. Promo products (aka retention items) really do work! An initial investment in quality, eye-catching products goes a very long way in building brand awareness. Volunteer coaching at your child’s baseball game? Grab a branded hat for practice. Speaking at a conference in front of several hundred? Don’t come empty-handed! Make sure your audience receives a lasting impression of your brand. We must encounter an idea up to ten times before committing it to memory. Everyday products offer many of those repetitions we need to become memorable with passive effort! Don’t overlook the value of investing in quality promotional products to amplify your brand.
- Keep your website fresh: In a rapidly changing online environment, when attention spans are short and time is limited, we all know that getting your website visitors to stick around for more than a second or two is an almighty feat. But you may not realize that their likelihood of finding you at all is not just in how expert your SEO was when your site was developed. Your likelihood of showing up in the search results is dramatically improved when the content on your site is dynamic. Maintaining a blog is an excellent way to keep your content fresh. Still, it’s also essential to make copy and media changes on your homepage ever so often. Swapping out background images, embedding videos, and changing the wording every one to two months can be an excellent way to grab the attention of the algorithms that businesses depend on to bring visitors to their site.
We have introduced a few ways to boost our reach, deepen our trust, and ultimately attain new clients with relatively low-budget tools. Over the weeks, we will dive into each of these in greater detail. Until then, take these tip teasers as food for thought and remember that success reflects your values at the end of the day. Delivering excellent quality goods and services, and doing so with integrity, is at the heart of all great brands.