Small businesses typically don’t have much of a budget for branding and marketing. It is the sort of thing that’s really hard, because a lot of traditional marketing media is expensive. TV spots, radio broadcasts and widespread posters are expensive, eating away at the company’s money when it could be better spent elsewhere. However, there are ways to help people find out more about the products that are on sale without necessarily having to spend a fortune to do so.
The first thing to do is to look at all the potential alternatives. For example, online marketing avenues are much cheaper. An account on a social media site is easy to put together and doesn’t cost much. While there is a bit of effort required in setting everything up properly and making sure everything looks complete and real, not to mention the maintenance required, it is ultimately a cost-effective alternative for smaller enterprises to look into.
Optimizing the traffic of the website – not to mention optimizing the website itself – is a good idea. The website is pretty much the primary portal that customers have, as well as a sales platform if the enterprise chooses to rig it that way. If it hasn’t been optimized to be easy to navigate and simple to use, then it isn’t going to do either job very well? Part of how this is accomplished is maintenance of the design so it’s revamped when it needs to be, along with regular updates of the content.
Engage the customer with the brand. This is actually simpler for a small business to accomplish, because its size often means that it has more opportunities to directly engage people. There isn’t some monolithic structure or bureaucracy to navigate. Anyone that can speak to the customer can, allowing for more personal connections to form. These bonds are powerful, because they can create or enforce loyalty between people. This is especially important if the business is a service provider, since the lack of a tangible product means that a personal connection is even more crucial to creating loyal, repeat buyers.
Finally, a small business is likely one that is operating at a local level. This means that it can use local resources to its advantage when branding. This is useful because people will get the references and understand the culture. However, it can become a liability if the branding is too tied down by its roots once the business expands.
I agree Chris it’s tough for small businesses to allocate money in the budget for marketing. We faced that every year at the private school where I teach. Seems like the ad budget always was the last thing to be looked at…and it didn’t get much funding.