Creative Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Get Creative with Your Advertising – and Save Money!

Are you looking for ways to promote your business and find customers – without having relying on classified or yellow page ads, email marketing campaigns or search engine marketing? We’ve got some ideas for you.

Keep in mind that unique marketing ideas generally don’t work for all types of businesses. They will work well for some, and not for others. However, there are plenty of ideas listed on this page that you are sure to find several that will work for your business – at an affordable price.

The bottom line to marketing is making the sale. Therefore, with any advertising technique you want to focus on reaching the right market. This way, you can do minimal marketing and get maximum results. Keep this in mind whenever you describe your business, products or services. Be as specific as possible, so you reach the right people and don’t waste your time advertising to people who will never buy from you anyway.

Let’s go!

Low-Cost Advertising Tools:

Web-based marketing methods like social media, search engine optimization and email marketing have been getting so much attention the last few years that many of the traditional offline marketing methods are overlooked.

The truth is that many print marketing strategies are still very effective, especially now that much of the competition is focused elsewhere – on the internet.

Typically, people assume print advertising is more expensive than online marketing. That can be true, but the bottom line is that if it is more effective at bringing in new customers and sales, it’s a better investment.

The key to advertising offline, in my opinion, is quality over quantity. Deliver marketing materials that are unusual and crafty – not what the prospect expects. They also need to be direct and to-the-point, meaning the seller needs to address the problem that they will solve for the prospect right at the get-go. No dilly-dally-ing around, and please – no hype-y language.

One of the least expensive ways to use print advertising is through flyers or postcards. No – not the flimsy photocopies attached to windshields – use professional-looking color flyers with a great headline and graphics delivered to the right prospects. Sound difficult? It’s not - This page shows you how.

Cheap Advertising: Pinterest

Many people know Pinterest as a quickly growing social media site. What most people don’t know is how to use it to advertise – for free.

Of course, lots of women (ok, maybe some men) use Pinterest to create their own pin boards with all sorts of images and photos. It turns out that many people also visit to shop. Or maybe they went there to create a pin board and then ended up shopping…. Well, whatever the case, it’s a good place to sell stuff. The question is “How?”

There is a learning curve to using Pinterest, but if you ask me, it’s worth the time and effort spent to learn simply for the reason that you can find lots of customers for free on a high traffic website that attracts shoppers. That’s really the winning combination.

More information

Online Advertising with Amazon Product Ads:

Pay-per-click advertising started years ago, and is a great way to reach prospects. However, over the years, more and more businesses are using it – thus driving up the cost of running ads. You can also advertise on Facebook as well, but some people argue that people who are visiting the Facebook site are there to socialize, not shop.

So, what about Amazon? They receive lots of traffic, and people obviously go there to buy stuff. Now Amazon offers pay-per-click ads on their site, similar to the advertising programs of Google and Facebook. The platform is called Amazon Product Ads.

Now, this marketing strategy is not for all businesses. First of all, it is more product-focused. If your business is centered around selling services, you may be better off using sites like Meetup or Betterfly to reach potential clients (although you can successfully sell products using these two sites as well).

Meetup offers sponsorship opportunities where you can sponsor a group. Each group is focused around a particular interest, so it can be fairly simple to locate your market, become a sponsor and connect with your prospects. This strategy is also great for local businesses, because most Meetup groups are formed locally.

Betterfly.com helps people learn new skills. Business owners can become “Betterists” through the site and share their knowledge with others, helping them learn these new skills. This advertising method is a unique way to gain exposure for your business – to your ideal target market.

Marketing with Twitter Coupons:

If you aren’t already doing it yourself, you’ve undoubtedly heard of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. These are turning into very effective marketing tools for businesses who give their customers a reason to “follow” them.

What I mean is that you can’t just talk about what you ate for breakfast every morning, and you also don’t want to blatantly advertise your company in every post. However, people love getting free stuff, and that’s where Twitter coupons, or “TwtQpons” come in.

Design your TwtQpons to meet your needs – a percentage or amount discount or a free product with purchase of another. TwtQpons can be redeemed online and offline, so virtually any business can take advantage of this cool marketing tool.

You can quickly create TwtQpons online on this site and then send them out to your followers. It’s incredibly cheap and fast, considering you don’t have to design, print and mail your coupons. Don’t just send junk – send really great deals worth talking about, because with social media – ideas can spread like wildfire.

Marketing for Local Businesses

Most local businesses can no longer depend on the yellow pages and store signs to bring in customers. More and more consumers are going online to find out about restaurants, salons, gyms, dry cleaners and more.

If you want to be one of the first businesses they see when they are looking for your product or service, you’d better get your business online.

One of simplest ways to do this is by getting listed in a variety of online local directories. The good news is that this is fairly cheap, and in some cases free.

A nice benefit to listing your business in these directories is that many times, customers can submit their reviews. If your business receives lots of positive reviews, these can result in bringing you even more customers (at no extra costs to you!).

Some of these directories are Google Local, Yelp, Super Pages (and more specialized sites Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon and Insider Pages). Get more information.

For more new business ideas for small and home-based companies, visit The New Business Idea. You can also get over 200 business start-up guides and download the Home Business Start-Up Checklist free from www.HomeBusinessCenter.com.