Five Low-Cost Marketing Activities for Small Businesses during a Recession

With the recession gathering steam, 2009 looks to be a tough year for small businesses. Belt-tightening on marketing budgets is a natural reflex to diminished sales. However, it would be a huge mistake for a small business to shut down marketing in a recession because marketing is essential to surviving a downturn. And fortunately, there are effective marketing activities that can be conducted for little or no cost to help keep your sales alive.

Marketing promotion doesn’t have to cost a bundle to yield results. Some of the most effective marketing activities are inexpensive and require little more than investing your time to make them work for your business.

Here are five inexpensive marketing activities a small business can do to keep existing customers coming back while creating new ones:

1. Fine-tune your Website. Go over your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor. Are visitors able to discern what your site is about and why they should do business with your company within the ten seconds that you have to capture their interest? Is the site easy to navigate – can visitors readily find what they are looking for? If your business is selling online, is the purchase process simple to use and fool-proof? Do you offer complementary items for sale during the checkout stage? And finally, have you at least performed basic search engine optimization by including meta, alt and header tags, as well as populating your page titles and textual content with keywords relevant to each page? If that sounds like gibberish to you, check out sites like www.WilsonWeb.com to get helpful non-techie site tuning tips. Take an hour or so to perform an audit of your Website – it will ultimately yield big returns for your business!
2. Nurture your customers and prospects with a monthly email newsletter. Use “push” marketing through an email newsletter to stay in touch with your customers and prospects. Gain their ineterst by providing valuable information. This allows you to promote your products or services directly to potential buyers. Include incentives and create a sense of urgency. Insert click-through links to special pages on your Website that are germane to any offers or subjects promoted in the newsletter. Use low-cost ($30-$50 monthly online services like www.ConstantContact.com which offer professional newsletter templates and email list management. Just remember to “drip, drip, drip” on your clientele to remind them of the value your business provides.
3. Include your Website address on all correspondence, especially business cards and emails. Add a tagline to emails under the signature block that promotes your business. For example, “World’s Largest and Most Affordable Supply of Custom Widgets.”
4. Do press releases. These can be simple one-page releases announcing new products or services offered by your business, your latest achievements, new employees, management changes, new markets, discount programs, etc. – basically anything of public interest. Press releases are free advertising! Distribute them online to targeted geographical locations or audiences by using inexpensive services like www.PRWeb.com ($80). Don’t worry - these services show you how to set up the release. Make sure to include a link back to your site to provide interested readers with more information or drive traffic to an online sales funnel. And since online press releases get picked up by other Websites, newsletters and blogs as “filler content,” they help to create one-way links to your Website from a variety of complementary sites, thereby enhancing your search engine ranking. Don’t forget to mail your press release to local hard-print publications as well!
5. Advertise weekly or monthly promotions on your Website and in your newsletter to generate new sales and keep your customers coming back. If appropriate, you can even get a unique Website address (e.g., BigSale-TailorMadeSuits.com) for about $10 that points to a page in your Website where the promotion is presented in detail along with possible online purchase options. You can also add this unique online address to flyers or small ads in your local paper or industry periodicals.

With a little effort, your small business can have an effective marketing program for minimal expense. And now is the time to try new things and learn new marketing skills while you may have some slack. If you master the above activities, they will continue to provide a foundation for inexpensive marketing once the economy recovers. So make an investment in your future by starting with just one of these proven marketing techniques. Then tackle the others. You will be surprised and pleased with the results!

Organizing Your Customer and Prospect Marketing

As your small business grows and you pick up clients and solicit prospects, it becomes very important to organize your customers and manage them properly. That's where customer relationship management (CRM) software earns its money.

With a CRM solution, you can easily keep track of your customer and prospect contacts, their status in the sales funnel and even create a unique marketing program for each. The latter is especially important. If you lay out a series of steps in your marketing program (e.g., send customized greeting, sign up for email newsletter, send autoresponder set of special offers, etc.), then you can rest assured that you will not neglect to nurture your customers or pursue possible new clients.

Remember, it costs a lot more to capture a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Also, it is easier to sell more products or services to an existing customer than a new one. And finally, nurturing prospective customers through ongoing marketing messages helps to close sales.

For small businesses, an easy CRM answer can be found online at www.zohoCRM.com. This Web-based service is free for up to three users in your company. I use it and recommend that you take a look at it.

Have a Great Idea? Sell It on a Single-Page Website!

Do you have a great idea? Did you come up with a better "widget" that you know will knock the world dead? Well, now you can begin marketing your widget worldwide within just a few days.

A great way to give your idea life is to launch a single-page Website as a 24x7 marketing machine that has but one purpose - to generate widget sales or capture leads. And you can accomplish this for under $4 monthly!

If your widget really is a great idea, you will be surprised how effective a single-page Website is. It is easier to optimize for the search engines too. For example, if you get a pertinent domain name, such as http://www.widget.com/, implementing the right meta tags and keyword densities is much simpler than a normal business Website. And you can have this for under $4 monthly in hosting fees!

The good news is that you don't have to understand how to put up a Website, how to write persuasive site content, how to create and insert order forms or set up online payment. We can do all that for you. Moreover, your "great idea" can be transformed into a dynamite Internet marketing machine within just a few days. Throw in some targeted pay per click advertising and watch your sales grow.

Contact us to learn just how affordable it is to launch your better widget.