Do you have a low advertising budget business? If so, there are plenty of low-cost ways to advertise and promotional tools you can use. If you have a business and want to expand in your industry but don't have the funds to do so, you can use the Internet to promote yourself at low cost. Everyone who has a business is on the internet nowadays and enjoying the convenience and ease with which they buy or learn new things related to their industry. Be present online and give your customers what they want.
Steps
Step 1. Set up your website
You can do it yourself or you can pay someone to do it. You can set up a website yourself by paying € 3 per month plus the annual fee for the domain name and site address. More importantly, your site needs to be easy to navigate, full of important information, and without unnecessary information. Avoid using anything that can turn your customers away; this is the time when the help of a qualified web designer will be best.
- Besides information about your business and discounts on your products, what else can you offer? Think about adding articles, individual staff stories and events, information on how to use your products or services, morals about lessons learned, free services like free downloadable books or tutorials, etc. Be generous and your customers will be surprised and come back to you often.
- Submit your website to various site directories. You can search the Internet for free site listings and place your site there for some advertising.
Step 2. Use pay per click advertising
Online advertising is huge and helps many websites survive. You can set a price to pay each time someone clicks on the ad you set. You will only have to pay if someone clicks on the ad. If nobody clicks it, you won't have to pay. These ad formats allow you to set a daily budget that you can change whenever you want.
- Use 'side ads'. They serve to show advertisements while people play online. Also take into account advertisements via smartphones and tablets.
- Use Google ads next to the Google bar. If you write something, it will appear on the right in the results as a small ad.
- Be careful when placing ads on your site and choose the type of ads to show well. Do you really want to show competitor ads?
Step 3. Use YouTube to promote your business
Perhaps the most popular and creative way to deliver information is through video. Some examples for doing this include:
- Upload a video about your business and post lots of links to other topics for people to see.
- Record a business dinner or other public event promoted by your business so that customers who were unable to come can still see the event.
- Record demonstration videos related to your business that can help people solve problems, causing them to want to know more about you. Do-it-yourself videos on common and basic problems can be a very effective way to share your business and attract the interest of new potential customers.
- Create a continuing story that shows how customers use and enjoy your products and services. It may take more work but stories are about grabbing people's attention and remembering you, especially if they follow your mini soap opera regularly!
Step 4. Participate in forums and blogs
It's a way of promoting your products and services, showing yourself as an expert who genuinely wants to solve people's problems. You can often do it for free. However, there is a huge caveat - make sure you post in forums that allow advertising to make sure you can include your business details along with your publications. Not all forums allow this, so if you do it in the wrong place they could block you and talk bad about it. In some cases you have to pay a fee to do this on some sites, but normally there is no need. In many cases, simply saying that you are the founder / owner / director / manager, etc. of a website may be enough to inform people that you have an online business. Let them do the rest, searching for you on the Internet –– consumers are smart.
Use user pages on sites that allow it. It can be a good way to promote your business, especially if you contribute site information that leads readers to your page for more details
Step 5. Use email marketing
You can create a list of customers, or potential customers, with whom you can keep up to date on a regular basis. However, many online mailboxes will classify your emails as spam, and customers may complain. Always ask for the customer's consent before sending emails and always keep in mind the spam laws, that is, you cannot send information to people who do not want to receive it. In any case, it makes more sense to only send emails to people who are interested in news about a particular product. You can send these e-mails in quantity, as you do for regular mail.
Create emails that are truly useful to consumers. Prepare a newsletter full of useful information about life in general, with humorous sayings, etc.; don't just send information about your products and your industry. Be smart
Step 6. Create a Facebook account if you haven't already
Even if your business already has a Facebook account, make sure it's optimized to take advantage of it. Use Facebook Ads, Updates, and Fan Pages to update your fans on what's going on in your business.
- Make sure you have a Facebook page and not a profile; profiles are for ordinary people and therefore limited for running a business. Also, if Facebook discovers that you use a profile to promote you, they may close it and you will lose all the contacts and progress you have already made.
- Provide relevant and interesting updates. Don't just talk about what you do; share sayings, new items, comments on things you've seen on fan pages, pictures, etc.
- Create a competition among customers to win a small prize. For example, if yours is an eco-friendly business, prepare a quiz for your fans or tell them to send you a photo of doing something eco-friendly to win one of your eco-friendly products. Afterwards, post the winner's photo with your product in hand; stages use of any means to interact with fans online. In the competition, don't mention the "Like", "Share" and "Tag" buttons because they go against Facebook's rules.
- For more information, do some research on how to use your Facebook page to increase your business profits and advertise yourself.
Step 7. Bring your business to Twitter
Pick a good Twitter name and start updating people. However, remember that Twitter is a conversation, not just a place to promote your products and services. Make sure your employees interact with customers.
- If you have a small business, be sure to maintain a minimum of interaction, then ask your employees to use, in their judgment, an aggregated Twitter account. This serves to build trust, tracking, and helps keep the conversation flowing for your business as well. The only exception to using an aggregate Twitter account is if you don't trust your employee. If so, why don't you trust him? Is it someone on your team or someone who still has a lot to learn? Be honest with yourself.
- Ask for opinions and opinions from those who follow you. Ask what they want from your business, whether it is something different or to be eliminated. These opinions are very useful information and are part of the flow of the conversation.
- Promote sharing of your information by making it interesting so that it is worth people's time. Aside from information about your business, you also share fun things like photos, inspiring messages, and charities you participate in.
- Add tweets to your website to show people what's happening in real time.
- There is no need to sit all day and use Twitter. Use services like TweetLater or Hootsuite to decide when to bring up what's new, while doing other things. So you can also have the advantage of the various time zones around the world. You can use email digest (automatically generated emails) and respond to interactions in time if appropriate. Additionally, email digests are useful for following Twitter trends and topics that are important and related to your business.
Step 8. Become a part of Pinterest
Pinterest has created a visual social platform that your business can use by providing quality photos of your business, or other relevant images. Make them interesting, compelling and shareable; you'll need some creativity to want Pinterest users to share them. As with advertising, focus on what makes your product interesting and desirable and try to show it through photos.
- Use People with Pinterest One creative way to get people to promote your products is to ask your Pinterest fans to post photos of using or displaying your product. Put these photos on the message boards of your "beloved customers". It will serve to show your customers that you have noticed them and also to future customers that people use your products –– and love them!
- Encourage staff to post photos of your website and official events to share with friends. Ask him to also post a comment along with the photo to get customers' attention, but don't tell him how to do it; often they do it well by nature, better than you might want!
Step 9. Go to Google+ Business Page
A newer service in the world of mass communications, use it for your business like along with Twitter and Facebook. It's still in development, so it's a good time to establish your business presence. Join groups, share forums, information and interact with your customers using Google Hangouts.
Step 10. Use surveymonkey to get feedback on your business
You can link surveys to surveymonkey via your site and Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts. You have to understand that almost every person loves polls. Ask people directly what they want and you will find out in no time.
- Ask people to leave comments on your products, services and promotions. be prepared for honesty!
- Use short and interesting polls.
Step 11. Keep social interactions important and respectful
Mass communications are a great tool for a business but can also be misused by creating complaints and annoyances to customers who may never return. As part of this:
- See your fans and supporters as people first, customers later. You establish a human connection because this is what mass communications need and expect and it is more surprising than an activity that takes on superiority. Make friends, follow your customers and care about them as you would like them to care about you. Interact and talk to them; don't think that the only thing they need is your products that you sell online.
- Provide meaningful information that matters. What you share, say and produce online must have a feedback with the people who follow you and not just be a reproduction of the motto "buy our product". Connect with the people and organizations it is good to do with and also share their content by talking online with them.
- Be smart instead of following the crowd. Tagging campaigns on Twitter and Facebook could be compelling. But do they stick to your brand thinking? Often it is better to wait until the facts have been presented, rather than to support a cause that arises like this the next day.
- While it is important to trust your employees who represent your mass communications, make sure they "understand" what it means to connect and interact with others online. Do not force employees to do this if they are not comfortable or if they show signs of cynicism or irritability. Your business cannot afford to be rude or missteps due to lack of motivation.
- Learn from mistakes made using online resources and mass communications. You will make mistakes but you will improve by taking a cue from them. Learn the lessons from these accidents and never repeat them again.
Advice
- Be creative with marketing and you will save time and money.
- Normally, to have your own website, you have to buy a hosting network service which, as mentioned before, costs only € 3 per month. Normally, you can buy an affordable service package for just € 7/10 per month. Additionally, you can buy online store sites, called commerce online sites, for around € 40 per month.
- Remember the basics of your business. The best form of advertising is free - word of mouth. If you have a great business with great customer service, your customers will talk about it. Their families and friends will remember you when they need a product and / or service.
- You can also leave your business cards in local stores, send flyers to residents when you make discounts, get on the business list if your city has one, hang up posters and more. In case you are printing flyers or posters, include your website and Twitter and Facebook accounts to make it easy for people to find you online.
- Another way to advertise is to visit seminars associated with your business. There you will be able to have relationships with others related to your business and receive good and bad ideas. Studying the competition is a good way to improve yourself and learn from the mistakes of others! Create an email account or a wiki or Facebook group to keep up to date with the people you met on those occasions.
- While internet advertising can cost you a little, the beauty of doing it and having your own online store is that you won't have to spend too much money on print advertising. Plus, you won't waste too much natural resources like trees and plastics when promoting yourself on the Internet. And you can do it "yourself" instead of paying very expensive advertising agencies to do it.
- To keep an eye on Twitter if you use Firefox, use the TwitterFox extension to avoid opening Twitter all the time.
- Don't overlook webinars (perks of the web) to promote your business. People love webinars (presentations, lectures and online seminars); they feel part of something, learning. There are many excellent webinar programs that you can learn to use easily; all you have to do is choose a decent topic to cover.
Warnings
- Remember that not everyone can access online content. For example, visually impaired people will have a hard time following online content and mass communications. Plus, there are people who just don't want to be online too long –– most people are! Don't leave these people out of your promotional strategies.
- Online customers are too crafty, smart and wise for stupid interactions. Treat customers as if you would like to impress strangers. Don't try to cheat them, be open and honest and don't expect people who interact with you will buy your products, but at least you have impressed them with your good intentions. Some will become your customers when you least expect it if you've treated them well and given them interesting, meaningful information and shared fun experiences, treating them as important individuals even when they weren't your customers.
