Got $10? You Can Market Your Small Business.

November 18, 2007

While big corporations typically spend a large chunk of their budgets on advertising, it’s not necessary to have that kind of cash flow to get your business in front of your prospective customers.  Here are several ideas you can use for marketing your small business, and most of them are around $10 bucks.  If they work for you- then obviously you want to continue them; and if they don’t, try making a slight modification or adjustment to what you’ve done and trying it again- this is the trick to measuring your results.  Make one small change at a time and then monitor the results of the change.

Give-a-ways

A time tested marketing technique is to give something away when a customer orders a product or uses your services.  Each month, you could offer a $10 Starbucks card, or a $10 gift certificate to a local restaurant and pick a name from all customers who ordered from you each month.  The idea is it encourages someone who is considering ordering from you to do it now, instead of later, and it encourages people to buy your items instead of buying from your competition.

Advertise a Chance to Win A Million Dollars

I know, I said $10 marketing techniques.  You could give away lottery tickets to customers, or to select winners, and that is their chance to win a million dollars.

Flyers

You can plaster your town with flyers, hand them out at a busy intersection, drop by a few businesses and hand deliver them to the receptionists of your clients or prospective clients (along with a cookie or piece of candy to make sure you are remembered!) Black and white copy specials sometimes stoop as low as a few cents a copy, so get 1,000 copies of your flyer and pound the pavement spreading the word.

Drive Thru Kindness

At the drive through, ask the cashier to let you pay for the order of the car behind you.  Then hand him or her your business card to give to the driver of that vehicle.  Hopefully they’re just getting a coffee!  You may only want to do this a few times, but who knows, one or two of the people you pay for may call you about your business and be the difference between falling short of your monthly sales goal and meeting your sales goal.

Make your Mailers Stand out

Instead of buying single 41 cent stamps to mail your envelopes; why not get a bunch of smaller stamps (like 1 cent or 5 cent stamps?) and just keep putting them on the envelope until it adds up to the right amount of postage?  The receiver definitely won’t miss your envelope with all that postage, and wonder what’s inside.

Posted in Starting a Small Business