Small business advertising is not that tricky. You can go for simple, low-budget actions that are also effective. The key is to focus on portraying your small business as something customers haven’t seen before, and the base for doing so is creativity. Explore the following guide to come up with new ideas and make smart marketing moves.
1. Create Solid Branding Assets
By the time you start advertising your small business, you should have a great logo, an appropriate color palette, and an overall brand identity that makes your business stand out. Here’s a brief checklist with descriptions to help you get ready before setting your advertising goals:
An eye-catching logo. Besides being attractive and professional, your logo must deliver a message about your business’ core values. An outstanding, well-balanced color palette. To choose the right color palette, first, you need to choose a primary color for your logo and branded pieces; then you have to select a couple of complementary colors that look harmonious.
Branded content. It’s fine if you don’t have the content already planned for every single week of 2020, but you should at least have some basic formats ready. Create your own templates for timeless content. This will give you some direction on what to do while planning monthly.
Product photos. These must be high-quality images that explain how customers can use your product or benefit from your service. Make an effort to update this photo stock every once in a while to keep customers interested in the content they haven’t seen before.
In order to work well for selling purposes, your branding assets must be unique and memorable. Think about the first impression you want to give to potential customers and work around that. Create a statement for your business, set your mission and show what you stand for.
Everything that has been discussed above is what you need to transform your small business into a brand. Remember anyone with enough money can start a business, but not all of them become brands. It takes effort, resources and, most of all, creativity to stay in people’s minds as a brand with a defined personality.
2. Get Inspired before Getting Creative
We deliver better results when we’re fully inspired, so you’d better gather your inspiration sources before getting ahead on your creative strategy. How to be creative when it comes to promoting your business? If you’re struggling to come up with fresh ideas, follow these simple tips to get the juices flowing.
Write it down. Many times good ideas appear when you’re not expecting them when your mind is traveling fast and you don’t even notice. So, instead of using your phone –which can be distracting– get a notebook or journal and start getting in the habit of writing things down.
Take a walk in a natural environment. You should recognize when to stop working, especially if you feel overwhelmed. Get up and pick an open space in your neighborhood, or take a walk around the block, the thing is to reset your mind, stop scrolling online, and focus on random thoughts.
Read a book you enjoy. Reading about other people’s ideas can trigger our own, but it has to be something you enjoy that doesn’t feel like a task.
Learn a new skill. It’s never too late to start learning something new. Don’t focus so much on the outcome, don’t try to succeed at first or else you’ll get frustrated. Instead, keep an eye on the journey and how your mind starts to think differently thanks to this new knowledge. It could be a new musical instrument, dance lessons, knitting, cooking… go for something you really enjoy doing.
Create a stimulating playlist. This comes along with setting a good environment to encourage creativity and inspiration. Set a playlist with tunes that allow you to focus.
3. Plan an Email Marketing
Strategy It’s not only for large brands; a small business can also benefit from email marketing campaigns. Planning is key so you don’t spend too much time and effort sending emails every time you need to advertise a new product or special offer.
Plan your email marketing keeping in mind a calendar and important dates and holidays that can boost sales for your business through the year. Once you’re writing the content for your email, keep it conversational and write from 300 to 500 words to get your customers to read what’s important. When emails are too long, chances are they will go directly to the trash can or will get marked as spam.
It’s not magic, newsletters really increase customer engagement for the simple fact that your business is entering someone’s personal space: their inbox. If they’re liking the frequency and quality of the content as well as the special deals they’re getting, they will continue to open them.
Among all the advertising channels, email has the highest customer retention rates at 90%. When you go that extra mile to create great email content, you reach out to current and potential customers, and that’s what successful small businesses do all year round.
4. Hand out Useful Promotional Items
This is a really basic yet valuable strategy to get your name out there. By offering promotional items such as mugs and tote bags, your name will be in someone else’s everyday life and that’s almost free advertising.
Make Outstanding Coffee Mugs. Let your brand do the talking. Place your logo or a catchy phrase on unique coffee mugs. Your presence online is important, but reaching people in real life will do wonders, especially if you take the time to create an eye-catching design for your promotional mug.
There are plenty of options to create designs that are appealing to those who like pretty mugs for drinking hot beverages. Also, if you include it in your design, you can encourage customers to use a hashtag online and tag your business on their social media.
If you’re not into creating a variety of graphics for your mugs, including a website URL along with your business’ name and logo is a good practice too.
You can use a coffee mug mockup to display your graphics inside a real-life scenario.
Offer a Handy Tote Bag. In case you didn’t know, plastic is out! If you’re not giving tote bags to your customers, it’s never too late to start doing something for the planet. Maximize your brand awareness with tote bags that include your logo.
Customers will take them outdoors, to shopping malls, and run errands with them. Make sure your graphics are big enough so people around you can see and read well. Another benefit of offering tote bags is that they’re stylish and affordable, and it’s safe to say every customer will want their own to bring their products home.
Drag and drop your brand’s graphics to a tote bag mockup so you can get a professional result to display your promotional bag.
Take into account that promotional bags can also come in handy to spread the word about campaigns and events coming up for your business, so if you’re planning to participate in an exhibition, a local fair, or a community event, create a special tote bag for the occasion.
Besides being functional and practical, this marketing strategy is something customers can actually touch; it is easier to remember a print item rather than an ad seen online. And, in case you need another reason to start your tote bag design now, remember it’s one of many eco-friendly options that will make your small business stand out, which will encourage customer trust.
5. Create Thoughtful Content for Social Media
How do you grab attention online among a universe of memes, pictures, and amusing content? Through valuable, useful content that is both interesting and well-thought.
A couple of key elements to keep in mind when writing for online content is to use the right words to send a precise message, and to make it short when you want to include a call to action, offer lower-priced items, and for image-heavy marketing. Long copy works, but only for specific purposes like including more details about your product, a testimonial of a happy customer, or a story you need to tell.
Persuasive content should be interesting, effective, and written smoothly so it feels natural and doesn’t feel like you’re lecturing your customers. When done correctly, this effort will translate into great sales, just focus on making it memorable, because in 2020 the equivalent of 1.7 MB of data per second will be sent for each human on Earth. That’s an overwhelming amount of content you’ll be competing against!
Now you know the basics on how to promote a small business using your creativity, so don’t limit yourself and feel free to try new methods and ideas. It’s great to adapt to a digital age when almost everything can be done online, but traditional marketing strategies –such as the ones listed above– still work because we still have an offline everyday life! Let us know your insights on successfully advertising your small business.