Free (or really inexpensive) ways to advertise your business

Kent Brockman

How about a thread for sharing a few suggestions of ways to spread the word about your business/advertise for free or very very cheap?

Facebook works brilliantly for my line of business, it's free but takes lots of time and effort.

Twitter is also free but time consuming. I find it better for brand awareness than actual sales.

We have had some PR in the media but it is very hard to see the benefits so I would be reluctant to pay for advertising.

We pay for fliers & hand them out at Trade/Baby/Christmas fairs to interested parties.

We encourage all customers to spread the word to their friends which is also quite successful, if slow.

Other suggestions/ ideas/ recommendations welcome........

Peterdalkey

Advertising/promotion is a real chicken and egg conundrum, unless you have enough sales/profits you cannot fund it and if you do not advertise/promote, your sales do not grow, thus making the expense unaffordable!! What is certain is that it is very easy to waste a lot of valuable cash on the wrong activity.

The key for SMEs is to establish as cheaply as possible what works for their individual business. Facebook/social media can be great for certain products/services but is pretty useless for B2B selling.

As an example, if you have a restaurant/bar in Temple Bar, sandwich boards and handing out flyers on the street could be very effective, as the vast majority of potential trade is from tourists or very occasional visitors, you are never going to get/build any loyalty for repeat business. It would certainly be worthwhile making sure you are listed in the tourist guides/sites.

If you are selling baby products, for instance then social media, mother/baby blogs, forums and groups are your key targets.

If you are a B2B seller, then a great website ( with or without eCommerce) with first class SEO is essential. Creative use of Google adwords is the way to go for any available advertising budget.

There are those, mostly in professional services it seems to me, who seem to put great store in the benefits of LinkedIn but I would see it more as a prospecting targeting tool or jobseekers site! Invaluable to some no doubt.

You need to understand your market and to craft effective advertising/promotional campaigns, it is generally safest to copy the proven activities of others who are successfully winning in your segment.

Having established what actually works, you then need a proper plan and a budget. Promotional expense is every bit as important as rent or any other business expense and you need to treat it as such. If your budget is cash poor , then add in plenty of time and pure graft. Lastly, the plan will only ever work if you execute it and stick with it.

jimmii

Editors want to hear about new businesses we contacted every media outlet we could and got a surprisingly good response and got some coverage in two national newspapers and a few magazines too at no cost. If you are selling to the general public they also like to be able to offer their customers special offers so if you can do a special price for readers of a certain paper or magazine they are likely to give you coverage from that too. The way they work seems to be to give you a bit for free to give you a taste then look to get some paid advertising out of you so take advantage of the free stuff while you can.

Another is the deal websites when we started our website got 20 times as many hits from the deal site we used than anything else. Obviously on the deal sale you make little or no money but it gives you the chance to create a long term customer. We gave every person who redeemed the deal voucher another voucher so they could get a discount next time they came in and we got a really good return rate from that and quite of few of those deal site customers have become regular customers because of it.

If you are lucky you could partner up with a large local business we have an offer with the local cinema and they have let us go in and talk about what we do with the 200 odd people in a special screening which was great as we knew we were talking directly to local people and they didn't mind listening as we gave away a few prizes from a comp they had to enter via facebook on the night.

Cianos

jimmii wrote: »

We gave every person who redeemed the deal voucher another voucher so they could get a discount next time they came in and we got a really good return rate from that and quite of few of those deal site customers have become regular customers because of it.

That's a really good idea. What line of business are you in? Talking to the cinema crowd is a great one too!

I second trying to get some coverage in the newspaper. If you're doing something new or a bit different plenty of publications could be interested in the story, especially if there's a local slant on it. We found the easiest way of doing this was to have a /press page on the website and just link people to it. Much easier than sending out PDFs that have to be reattached to emails and the like. Google around for different papers' journalists, find their Twitter account and send them a polite @ tweet with the link to your release (a photo on the press release page is a big help too, as well as relevant links, phone numbers etc).

Again on Twitter, I'd recommend everyone check out #IrishBizParty on Wednesday evenings from 9pm - 11pm for hyper-fast B2B networking. For anyone unfamiliar with the workings of Twitter, you can do a search for a particular hash-tag and it will show you all the tweets that include that hash-tag. This allows it to be used for networking because everyone tweeting #IrishBizParty will see all the other tweets containing #IrishBizParty, and on Wed evenings there's loads of businesses doing exactly that. It's a good way to make some connections, and at the very least build up your number of Twitter followers.

If you haven't yet tried Google Adwords, with a bit of Googling (or PM me if you're having trouble) you should be able to get a voucher for something like €75 worth of ads for €25. I always recommend AdWords as the easiest way to start seeing a response back from your website because it gets you listed in the short term. With the free ads in the beginning it's a pretty cost effective way of trialling it and seeing if you can get a decent positive ROI on the ads (in which case it's a no-brainer to continue paying for the ads). You do need a good site to send the traffic to though otherwise you're wasting money on those clicks.

Atomico

Peterdalkey wrote: »

Advertising/promotion is a real chicken and egg conundrum, unless you have enough sales/profits you cannot fund it and if you do not advertise/promote, your sales do not grow, thus making the expense unaffordable!! What is certain is that it is very easy to waste a lot of valuable cash on the wrong activity.

The key for SMEs is to establish as cheaply as possible what works for their individual business. Facebook/social media can be great for certain products/services but is pretty useless for B2B selling.

As an example, if you have a restaurant/bar in Temple Bar, sandwich boards and handing out flyers on the street could be very effective, as the vast majority of potential trade is from tourists or very occasional visitors, you are never going to get/build any loyalty for repeat business. It would certainly be worthwhile making sure you are listed in the tourist guides/sites.

If you are selling baby products, for instance then social media, mother/baby blogs, forums and groups are your key targets.

If you are a B2B seller, then a great website ( with or without eCommerce) with first class SEO is essential. Creative use of Google adwords is the way to go for any available advertising budget.

There are those, mostly in professional services it seems to me, who seem to put great store in the benefits of LinkedIn but I would see it more as a prospecting targeting tool or jobseekers site! Invaluable to some no doubt.

You need to understand your market and to craft effective advertising/promotional campaigns, it is generally safest to copy the proven activities of others who are successfully winning in your segment.

Having established what actually works, you then need a proper plan and a budget. Promotional expense is every bit as important as rent or any other business expense and you need to treat it as such. If your budget is cash poor , then add in plenty of time and pure graft. Lastly, the plan will only ever work if you execute it and stick with it.

Great tips there, but would have to highlight the part about social media being useless for selling. It's not for selling in the first place!! It is a much more a tool for lead generation as people just don't want to be sold to on social networks, generally speaking.

The likes of Twitter and LinkedIn (LinkedIn less so I would say) can be great for lead generation and building a following - which you can then market to afterwards, in the right way.

jimmii

With Facebook I think it depends on the industry you are in. We get a lot of sales from posting things on facebook.

jimmii

Cianos wrote: »

That's a really good idea. What line of business are you in? Talking to the cinema crowd is a great one too!

Retail and we're about 50m from the Cinema so we get a few people coming round when they are going to see a film!

Atomico

jimmii wrote: »

With Facebook I think it depends on the industry you are in. We get a lot of sales from posting things on facebook.

Yep, Facebook is generally better for B2C and for certain demographics (like students). Fashion retail, for example, is a prime candidate for Facebook. Same with tonnes of other consumer products.

Twitter is better for B2B, and is much more suited to reaching out to make people aware of what you do and who you are. It's more of a slow burner but great for building relationships.

jimmii

Yeh twitter doesn't work so well for us because its images on Facebook that create the sales.