Regardless of whether you’re a start-up or an established business, it can be tough to promote your business on a limited budget. Often, the most effective marketing campaigns are those that are creative within their means. Though it can help, you don’t have to spend money to promote your business.
Even some of the largest companies are now turning to inexpensive social media venues to get the word out about their products. Here are some cheap ways to use social media to punch your way into the market.
Blog.
A blog is an excellent and increasingly popular way to not only get the word out about your business, but also to create a dialogue with customers. A WordPress blog is completely free. If you can commit yourself to writing one high-quality, engaging blog post a day (or hire someone else to write it), in a few months’ time you will have tens of thousands of visitors hungry for the content that only you can provide.
The key benefit of a blog is the dialogue that it allows you to have with customers. Always try to cultivate a solid batch of comments for every post. Comments are free content. Usually the people commenting are passionate subject matter experts in the field, and potentially valuable contacts for your business. This also allows you to hear what your market wants, and how you can better get it to them. Always attach “Retweet” and “Like” buttons after every article so people can share your post with their friends.
Facebook.
Everybody and their Mom now has a Facebook page. Facebook has quickly become one of the top marketing tools alongside Google’s plethora of marketing gadgets. Use Facebook to share pictures, links, and blog posts to your own blog and other related items of interest.
The key with Facebook is to try and be very organic. When marketing on Facebook, think of it as a way to develop relationships and create exposure rather than trying to sell products. If you have a smart phone you can do this extremely quickly, several times a day to create an engaging story of your businesses’ day-to-day.
Twitter.
For such a simple platform, Twitter can be one of the most difficult to master, although one of the most effective if done correctly. Twitter, like Facebook, is not meant to be a sales tool, but rather a way to indirectly connect with fans and customers. Much like Facebook, you can capture interesting moments of your operation or daily life in your business, or just tweet links of related subject matter. In fact, you can set your Facebook to share anything you tweet, so it can all be done seamlessly.
The key to promoting yourself on Twitter is to follow and engage relevant people within your business or industry, and add value to your peers by offering insight and expert opinion.
Use Video!
Your average web surfer has a rapidly diminishing attention span. With all the ads and links, it can be hard for someone to focus on text alone for longer than a few minutes at a time. You can capture people’s attention better through video, and really show your personality and enthusiasm to your visitors, followers, and friends.
Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Knowing Where Your Brand Places During Holidays
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011The holiday season and new year bring some exciting new consumer products to the open market, and now is as good of time as ever for companies to re-brand their marketing strategies, too. As millions of people choose to spend time with their families, take vacation away from work and focus more on casual Internet browsing with their free time, you can captivate this audience with an unusual approach to your normal routine. If you know exactly how useful your website may be to potential holiday browsers, you can easily become more visible to more people.
Determine how valuable your product or services are during the holidays and capitalize on its potential reach for Internet users. Your holiday SEO should be filled with content that relates to your target user-base rather than strictly marketing another product. Readers want to be engaged in the information, not just be told what to buy or where to go. The holidays give you the chance to relate directly to your readers through interest and emotions.
Use the holidays as an opportunity to offer great deals and incentives that will make people want to share the information discovered on your website. Inbound links are a great way for you to rank higher on SERPs this holiday season. Social networking and blogging help generate links for your website’s authenticity, therefore the more popular users find your content and services, the more links you will ultimately obtain.
Check your traffic stats and peak activity throughout the day to understand when and why your site’s users are browsing when they are. Daily content updates are always refreshing for users and will encourage daily visits, but you don’t want to saturate your audience. Make sure you have content that’s both relevant to your website and a constant variety of information for readers.
