Every business in this world aims to be able to grow and cater to as many people as possible. When ethical business practices and honest businessmanship is given the boost of advertisement, business flourish and the good name becomes better and better. A smart businessman knows to make sure his company’s name reaches as many people as possible. And so, he also knows advertising one’s business doesn’t have to cost a fortune. There are cheaper ways to advertise your business. Here are a few ways to get maximum reach while spending as little as possible from the business’s treasury.
Local Listing Services
The most commonly known as widely used name for a listing service is Google Places. Just a quick search for a particular store, service or a company gives results instantly. Having the company/office/shop listed on Google basically serves as a free impression to anyone looking for it. Listing your place on Google doesn’t cost you a single penny. If there are good reviews to back it up, it is like a cherry on top of the cake, always works in favour of the company.
Social Media Presence
Making an account and a business page on all of the major social media channels is absolutely free. One can very easily set up a business page and that too within minutes. No technical expertise is needed to create and post on your page. Once regular posts start going out from the page and people start to engage with its content, free publicity starts coming in. For every businessman, it is imperative to focus on social media to reach a wide range of audience. Staying active on social media doesn’t even need working full time for it. Just one post per day too goes a long way.
Once social media presence is established, businesses can then also think about spending money. Of course, spending money for advertising on social media platforms is not compulsory. However, trends from the past few years have shown that the businesses who use social media to boost their audience have shown greater growth prospects as well as conversion numbers than yellow pages and similar conventional advertisement methods.
Having a Website
There are many open source/freeware platforms which let you make a website for your business. The most commonly used platform is wordpress, which allows free website creation with an intuitive UI. Once again, all a businessman needs is to put in some time to create a website the way he likes. There are freemium options available too, just like social media pages. Having a website is in itself a boost. In a similar fashion to google searches, website results are an instant publicity event, virtually free of cost. Having a nice looking website immediately has an impressive effect on a potential lead and attracts them towards the business. One more advantage is that adding your website link on the visiting card (if you have any) immediately brings a positive effect on people who get your card.
Start a Blog
People like miscellaneous reading. They actively read small articles which are published, especially if the topic/subject is one that interests them. For example, a marketing agency would try to woo people who have an interest in the field and as such would post weekly blogs on anything related to marketing. A person reading on it would definitely check out the business once their interest has been piqued. Just like all the previous methods, creating a blogging account is free.
Businessmen can share these blogs from their social media pages as well for an added bonus effect. The more reach one can garner, the better it is for the business. Having an excellent blog is also a preferable practice for personal and business branding.
Building an Email List
Having an emailer list ready can help you send out bulk emails with interesting content for your mailer list. An emailer can contain special offers, festival greetings, interesting reads for the customers, blogs and digest for people to stay up to date with the world and latest news in the field of their interest etc. Building and updating an email broadcast list regularly helps in creating an identification of one’s brand in the minds of people.
Just like all the other services, there are free tools available for making creative and appealing emails; if the mails are well-crafted, receivers would tend to open them and not send directly to trash.
Closing Note
All the above methods have been known to work and produce favourable results for businesses over the years. As smart businessmen, these then become go-to methods to get people thinking about the business/people putting the content out. Afterall, every ad campaign, marketing idea is focussed upon reaching as many people as possible. The more people a company can get to talk about it, the better it is for the company to not just grow, but also flourish
