Creative Ways to Market your Business

You put a lot of work into your business, but to truly succeed you need a strong marketing plan. After you cover the basics, it’s time to move on to some creative ways to get the word out about what you have to offer. Here is a list of business marketing ideas to get you thinking about all of the different ways you can promote your business.

Socialize on social media

Popular social media channels include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Snapchat. Each of these social media platforms are unique in its own right and require unique ways of engagement. Rather than try to master it all at once, choose a few you like and try to master those first. Source: entrepreneur

Awesome Business Cards

Get yourself some snazzy business cards, then give them to every person you lay eyes on.  Every handshake should come with a business card. The more people who find out about your business, the better – even if it’s just a quick glance at a business card. Source: wordstream

Limited Edition Products

Celebrate summer with specially designed products or service packages that are limited to the summer months. Put a summer twist on things by incorporating pineapples, flamingos, beach balls…really anything that says ‘fun in the sun’ into your products or group together services you offer to cater to summertime activities. Source: thrivehive

Leverage your community

You don’t have to think big when it comes to your marketing efforts. Think locally. What’s going on in your community?

Sponsor a Little League team or a 5k charity walk/run. Print bookmarks and leave them at the local library. Get to know your ideal customer and think about how and where they spend their time.

Then search for opportunities to get in front of your customer with your marketing message. Source: blogs.constantcontact

Get into your local newspaper

Write a press release about anything newsworthy going on in your business. Not sure how to write one? Read these basic PR tips or simply pick up the phone and speak to a journalist to see if they're interested in running something. If they are, they'll probably write the story themselves. Source: creativeboom

Help Reporters Find You

Reporters are constantly looking for sources to quote in their stories. One way they find those sources is to use services that distribute their request for sources to publicists, experts, marketers and others who want to be sources. To find out when reporters are looking for information you can provide, sign up for these lists and scan them regularly. Source: businessknowhow

Start Blogging

Blogging can be a creative and low-cost way to market your business. Use your expertise to create unique content that’s helpful to your customers, and from there you can build a readership. Start with 1-3 high-quality, well-researched posts a month, and add an email signup on your blog so you can build an audience of dedicated readers.

WordPress is the most popular tool for blogging, but you can also check if the content management system (CMS) or website builder you’re using has a blog option. Be patient: This strategy can take several months of consistent content creation to pay off. Source: logojoy

Set Up Contests and Giveaways

Everyone loves the word free, so plan out fun contests and giveaways that keep your audience engaged. This will also build brand awareness and help you to connect with existing or potential customers. You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg. You can give away practically anything if you market it the right way. Get free advertising if you give away items like pens, keychains or notepads with your logo on them. Source: chicagonow

Repurpose Your Content

Recycle and repurpose content to increase return on investment. Recycle content by updating a popular post. For example, take one of your most popular posts from 2016, update that article with new, relevant information and republish it. You can also repurpose content by posting the same content in different formats. For instance, take an article and create a podcast using the same information. Recycling and repurposing content stretches ROI. Source: fitsmallbusiness

Ask Your Customers to be Your Advocates

Word-of-mouth will always be one of the most powerful forms of marketing. Leverage your satisfied customer base and ask them to leave reviews online, so that potential customers can see them when they search for your business. Podium, a review management software, lets you send review invitations, respond to those reviews, and monitor insights, messages, web chats, and customer reviews from 20+ review sites — all in one dashboard. Businesses that use Podium have seen up to 15 times more reviews and an increase in local traffic. Source: fitsmallbusiness

Pop-Up Shops

If your business is online, you don’t have to open a retail store to get the benefits of selling in person. You can run a pop-up shop instead. Chances are there’s an unused space in your city that would love to have you come in for a week—or even just a weekend—and open shop.

Running a pop-up shop will help you create exclusivity around some of your products, get covered in local media, take advantage of seasonal shopping, unload old inventory, and chat with your customers in person to learn more about them. Source: shopify

Leverage Your Mobile Website

If you have an existing website that is fully functional and mobile-friendly, then your site can be one of the greatest assets to promoting your app. At one point or another, all of your customers or anyone interested in your company will find their way to your website. When they do, it is important they all know you have an app.

Including your app in your site could mean sectioning off a part of your site exclusively for the app. Such as the corner of the screen or towards the middle of the web page. While this method can bring in more downloads we recommend taking an alternate approach. Instead of placing it solely on your site, have a pop-up page display whenever someone visits your site.

This way, the app is the first thing your viewers see. The pop-up page is simply a gentle reminder that you have an app and your customers are given either the option to download the app or continue to your mobile site. Source: buildfire

Send handwritten holiday, birthday, or thank you cards

To past and current clients, valued partners, vendors in your referral network, connections who have helped you--everyone you can think of. This is a low-cost and unique marketing idea for small business, but many entrepreneurs have reported its effectiveness.  Source: writtent

Tips on how to Improve your Sales

Sales may have a negative connotation, but it doesn’t always have to be so direct and intrusive. Increasing sales takes more than having a great product.

How can you increase sales without being too pushy? Use these creative ideas:

Clarify your mission

Begin by understanding your business niche. What do you do best? Who needs what you do? How do you best approach these prospects? How much are they willing to pay? If these questions are not answered easily, campaign at the top for clarity and vision. Source: sellingpower

Talk to Your Current Customers

Your current customers are one of your best resources for increased revenue. It’s much easier to upsell a client who already is familiar with your work, the quality of your product and services, and has already incorporated aspects of your services into their business.

If you’ve built a relationship with your clients, and they consider you a trusted partner, then they are likely willing to share current challenges they are facing. By listening, you can easily analyze how you might be able to help them address these challenges by offering new or alternative products. This approach allows you to continue to be a good partner while also increasing your revenue. Source: quickbooks

Develop Your Competitive Advantage

You define your competitive advantage, the reason for buying your products or services, in terms of the benefits, results or outcomes that your customer will enjoy from purchasing your product or service that they would not fully enjoy from purchasing the product or service of your competitor.

Focus on the benefits of what makes your product better than others. Source: briantracy

Give your full attention

When a customer is considering making a purchase, you want to give the impression that you're available to fulfill any needs or answer any questions that may arise. You don't want to give the impression that you're distracted or that you're attending to your customer as an afterthought. Whenever possible, interact with customers on a personal, one-to-one basis, returning to your other duties only when the job is done. Source: wikihow

Create a flow of consistent leads

Unless you have a one-of-a-kind product or service, you will need to do some marketing to inform people about your offer and selling to push them to make a purchase. Not everyone will make a purchase during the first point of contact. This is where the very important nurturing process has to take place in order to qualify people as leads. You create leads by providing content that educates your audience about the value of your product or service. This is done through your blog, webinar, e-book, and guides. These lead generation tools help build up the interest of people, turning them into solid leads who can be converted into customers.

The best way to improve your sales process is to study your customers and prepare yourself for any questions they might throw at you. You never want to appear unsure of what you are talking about when communicating with leads. Hesitation could stop them from committing to becoming a customer. Therefore, you need to commit yourself to improving your sales skills daily. The people who are underperforming with their sales are those who do not have sufficient leads to nurture. This is why you need to make sure that you are keeping a full pipeline of leads, and never operating with an empty reservoir. You can never have too many leads, especially when sales is a numbers game to begin with. Source: incorp

Prioritizing

To harness your most effective thinking, decide which activities are most important at the beginning of each day and then focus on one activity at a time, to the exclusion of all others. Source: jillkonrath

Personalize Prices

One big thing separates good sales teams from bad ones – a relationship with the pricing team. Sales and pricing professionals constantly butt heads, but if they don’t work together to build profitable deals, your company can’t possibly move forward.

Work closely with the pricing team to dig into customer and product mix to build truly unique prices based on specific customer needs and product strengths. Don’t try to sell prospects something they don’t need at a price that doesn’t work for them. Figure out what they value and sell on that instead. Source: thekinigroup

Delivering Persuasive Presentations

If you are not good at getting your message across to potential buyers, you will find yourself lacking enough impact to close on deals. While not every sales rep needs to deliver visual or oral presentations, those that do had better be darn good at delivering effective and persuasive ones.

Sure, the internet continues to change the way we deliver and display information, but that does not mean you should ignore being good at delivering presentations to prospects. Source: thebalancecareers

Encourage Your Sales Staff to Upsell

Essentially, upselling involves adding related products and/or services to your line and making it convenient and necessary for customers to buy them. Just placing more products near your usual products isn’t going to do much. How to increase sales? Persuade the customer of the benefit. Source: thebalancesmb

Invest in Quality Product Images

Regardless of what you sell, include high-quality images of your products – no tiny thumbnails or poorly lit shots taken in your stock room. Also be sure to include a wide range of images. It might seem overkill to include shots of your products from every conceivable angle but try it out. People love to kick a product’s proverbial tires before buying, especially online. Source: wordstream

Boost Morale

Morale is similar to confidence: A sales team with high morale will always outperform one with low morale, getting more work done with fewer resources and a better attitude.

Strong team morale is the result of good management. Here are a few steps you can take to boost morale:

Be trustworthy; always keep your word.

Convey in words and actions a concern for the welfare of your sales team.

Demonstrate a commitment to excellence in all aspects of the business. Source: business2community

Stay Organized

If you’re disorganized as a sales manager, then your entire team will be disorganized. Organization is something that can be taught, but you need to be willing to put in the effort to learn.

Whether you’re a salesperson or a manager, think about how miserable your sales life would be if you didn’t have an organized sales track to follow. Organization is paramount in any facet of business, but sales are so important to the growth and sustainability of a company. Without sales, the company sinks. So, stay organized! Source: customerthink

Ask for Feedback

Especially on what your offerings lack. Is there a specific problem that you could help them with?

For example, a printing company might do an excellent job printing promotional brochures that clients mail out to generate business. A client who wants to automate the process even more could be interested in having the envelopes printed and addressed. They may even like to have the printing company handle the mailing itself.

If you can provide a broader range of services for your current clients, you become even more essential to their business. That means more sales and a stronger relationship. Source: thrivehive