Four Creative Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Small Business

creative marketing

marketing planToday’s new media landscape provides small businesses with creative marketing opportunities to compete more effectively with bigger businesses

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Let’s face it — small businesses don’t have the endless resources large companies have to market their products and services. In the old days, traditional advertising was the only real way to reach customers, which put small businesses at a distinct disadvantage. The rise of new media has democratized the process of attracting new customers to a great degree and that marketing power gap between the big guys and the small guys has narrowed. Indeed, there are myriad creative ways small businesses can market themselves without breaking the bank.

Here are four creative marketing ideas that are tried and true.

Produce Great Blog Content

Here’s the understatement of the decade: blogging drives incredible amounts of traffic to your site. Not sure about the power of blogging? Consider some of these eye-popping stats from industry sources:

  • 434% — the increase in indexed pages on search engines from companies that blog regularly.
  • 55% — the boost in visits to the websites of companies that blog versus those that don’t.
  • 32 million — the combined readership of U.S. blogs.
  • 52% — the percentage of B2B marketers who say blogging is their most important marketing tactic.
  • 81% — the number of blog readers in the U.S. who say they trust the information in blogs.

Of course, the degree to which blogging boosts your traffic and conversion rates may vary. The best thing you can do to make these stats work for you is to produce awesome content. All blogging costs you is time, so use it wisely; take the time to give your readers something of real value and they’ll start to see you as a trusted source. If your business degree didn’t prepare you to write effectively day in and day out, it’s worth paying for someone who can.

Get Social

A whopping 79% of the population in the United States has a social media profile, giving your business unprecedented access to potential customers. Make a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and any others that make sense for your business. Then, link to them on your site and engage with them by joining groups, engaging in conversations and posting content.

Perhaps more than any other marketing strategy, social media is where you can build your brand’s personality and engage customers in a meaningful way, so simply posting content isn’t enough. You need a consistent tone — this could be snarky, informative, friendly, professional, etc —  a plan and creative ideas for posts that will cut through the noise. Something like:

  • Running a giveaway where you offer a product or service for free.
  • Doing a contest where customers engage with your brand to win something.
  • Posting coupons or promotions that only social media users can see.

Let Customers Behind the Curtain

Transparency is big right now. Customers like to feel like they’re dealing with real human beings, not a faceless company. One of the biggest examples of this happened just last year when an interior design company decided to let customers in on the creative process of redesigning a home. They posted color schemes, furniture options, rugs, and design elements and let their social media fans help them choose. The process became a viral sensation that made headlines and garnered this small business a national (and even international) following.

You can do this in your small business, too. Let customers behind the scenes and give them a vested interest in your company. Run a bakery? Let customers help decide your pastry of the week or have a say in ingredients. Have a brewery? Let your fans pick a promotion on their favorite beer.

Share Your Expertise

One of the best ways you can build relationships with customers and establish trust is to share your expertise. If you have a brick and mortar store, you can hold events where customers can learn skills for free and have fun in the process. Restaurants can conduct cooking classes on off hours, breweries could let customers learn the brewing process and a candy shop could show patrons how to make sweet confections.

Even if your business is entirely online, you can still take advantage of this. If yours is a tech business, you could make videos with tech-buying advice or computer repair tips. If it’s a design company, you could post tutorials in Illustrator or Photoshop. Even a car repair shop can post videos showing customers how to make small automobile repairs.

As you can see, with a bit of creativity, you can market your small business without spending a fortune.

At Study.com, we aim to deliver a better way to learn — one that lets you learn what you want, the way you want, and in a way you can afford. We want to empower you to become that better version of yourself education is supposed to allow.

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