The two greatest problems with self-promoting your business are A) making it credible and B) making it cost-effective. First of all, why wouldn’t you claim your product to be the best there is? After all, the more you praise it, the more you sell.
The more you sell, the more money you earn. Well, your clients are aware of this, as well, which means that they aren’t likely to take your words at a face value. As for the other problem, sure, you can just go out and hand out one million copies of your latest product, however, there’s no way to financially justify this lavish marketing strategy.
Sure, both of these examples may have sounded a bit extreme, yet this doesn’t make the points made this way any less valid. In order to promote your business in the best way, you need to find low-cost low-effort methods that generate the best value. In this way, you get an outstanding ROI that you can use later on. Here are some suggestions.
Table of Contents
1. Use social media
When we say that you should use social media to promote your business, we’re not just talking about sharing and displaying your products on your account. Think about it, why would someone be attracted to a group/person/organization that only talks about themselves? There are several far better strategies you can use to your advantage.
For instance, why not look for industry-related groups, seeing as how these are the meeting spots for your audience and a perfect place for you to reach them. Posting an interesting piece of trivia in one of these groups, entering a debate or simply concurring with a potential customer can help you make some conversions. To do this successfully, you first need to find out where your audience is gathering.
2. Email marketing
While email marketing isn’t free (contrary to popular belief) it’s definitely worth your time and money, regardless of how tight your marketing budget may be. First of all, email marketing is still the optimal B2B outreach technique, seeing as how it is deemed as incredibly professional, even formal, in most cases.
Second, email marketing boasts one of the highest conversion rates in the industry with as much as 4400 percent ROI. This means that every single dollar you invest in email marketing stands to return about $44. In other words, this is a technique you absolutely have to find a way of integrating.
3. Promotional merchandise
In the introduction, we talked about the defense mechanisms that your customers have towards marketing, however, promotional merchandise is quite an effective way to overcome this obstacle and work past them.
Think about it, it’s all about giving and receiving value, so if you hand out custom t-shirts to your potential clients, it’s more than clear to them that you aren’t doing this out of the goodness of your heart. They know you have an agenda but do they really care? After all, they did just receive a free t-shirt with no formal obligation to buy your product. This kind of relationship is what makes them look more kindly upon your brand in general.
4. Start a podcast
Blogging and podcasting are both quite effective methods of keeping your audience interested for a prolonged period of time, keeping them close by and building a personal brand, while you’re at it.
The reason to choose a podcast over blogging is due to the fact that it’s a faster-growing format. Think about it, if you have nothing to talk about on a Monday morning, you can simply go through the comment section or the fan mail and address some of the issues that are mentioned there. Overall, you have an easy job at coming up with new content and it’s much easier to maintain the continuity.
5. Create tutorials
Finally, if you have products that require assembly or can be used in DIY projects, it might be a good idea to start a trend of creating tutorials that your target audience might find useful.
Same as in the merchandise section, this is a way of you offering something of value to your audience. Going through this extra effort will be a welcome sight and, aside from promoting your own products in an organic way, you get to drive more people to your website or, at least, to your YouTube channel.
Conclusion
The last thing you need to understand is that promoting your business the right way doesn’t stop here. Guerilla marketing such as street art can also be quite effective, yet, it is considerably much more situational than the above-listed five methods of promoting your business. This is mostly why the five techniques we featured in this post are commonly referred to as go-to business promotion methods. The consistency of their results and the cost-efficiency of their efforts are what makes them a force to be reckoned with.
