When you’re launching a fledgling business, the pressure to get your brand’s name out there in an aggressive, fast manner is hard to overstate. To succeed in today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, knowing how to stand out amongst competitors in your industry is key, and advertising is often the best way to achieve this goal. Without the right know-how, however, you may not know how to start your advertising efforts. Thankfully, we are here to help, with these six creative ways to market your fledgling business effectively;
Instagram Stories
Instagram is one of the most trafficked, popular social media sites on the planet. If you’ve ever browsed Instagram stories, which you likely have, you’ll have noticed how specifically targeted advertisements are between your stories. By purchasing ad space on Instagram stories, you’ll reach heavily qualified audiences, and in turn significantly boost your ability to find new, consistent customers for your fledgling business. Video has been shown to engage ad-viewers much more than a simple image, so finding a way to keep your Instagram story advertisements sharp, professional, and engaging is certain to get you the most bang for your advertising buck.
Branded Promotional Items
If you want your brand’s name to stay burnt into customers’ minds, you need to give them something physical (and useful) that has your brand labeled on it. Finding items you can buy in bulk, branding them, and then giving them out to potential customers as branded promotional items will do wonders for getting your business’s name out there. Water bottles are a particularly amazing option for branded promotional items, as others will see the water bottle’s logo when people are out and about drinking from it during their daily outings. By giving customers something they can truly get value out of, they will be more likely to patron your business in return as well.
Offer Discounts for Social Media Shares
While making your own social media advertisements is a great option for getting your fledgling business’s name out there, sometimes it’s better to let your customers do that work for you. By offering discounts on products and services to your social media followers in exchange for them promoting your business, you can massively expand your brand awareness. Because the recommendation of your business is coming from someone that’s not professionally associated with the business, those that see this “advertisement” will be more likely to trust its legitimacy. Find qualified customers with a large social media following, then reach out to them directly with the offer to trade discounts for a social media share. If your efforts are successful enough, this may become one of your most valuable advertising campaigns.
Write a Quality Blog Post
Showing that you have expertise in your field is a tried and true way of gaining potential customers’ trust. One of the best ways of achieving this trust is by carefully curating a company blog that shares useful information that’s related to your business’s products and services. Consider hiring a professional blog writer to ensure the content is as polished, engaging, and well-structured as possible. If you can get links to your blog posts from enough sources, you can even rely on people stumbling across your blog posts when they perform Google searches (which will in turn lead a larger number of qualified potential customers to your company’s website).
Use Email Marketing
Email marketing has been around since the dawn of the internet and has remained highly useful for getting a new business’s name out there. If you can curate your email marketing campaigns to be engaging, and ensure you do not oversaturate potential customers with content, you can take advantage of this affordable, reliable, and easy-to-manage style of advertising your fledgling business. Email marketing is highly flexible as well, so you can more specifically target what products and services from your business you want to emphasize to your new customer base when drafting the emails you’ll be sending out.
Create a Referral Program
To ensure you continuously bring in new customers, while simultaneously creating new de facto brand ambassadors, making a referral program that’s tied into discounts for your business is critical. Especially for fledgling businesses, this is one of the most important programs you can kickstart. The public’s attention span tends to be incredibly short, so getting on their radar as quickly and aggressively as possible is critical, and referral programs remain one of the best ways to do just that.
Here’s to Your Exciting New Business
With your business looking to make its mark, finding varied, inventive ways to ensure the public understands the value of your products and services needs to become your top priority. By putting in the work, being flexible with your strategies, and understanding what specific customer base you’re aiming to attract, your advertising efforts will be sure to pay off hugely.
