Isn’t it always the story of a small business owner’s life to want to promote their biz but not have enough funds for really kick-ass marketing tactics? Don’t sweat it, there are still ways you can get your brand out there on that tight budget. The key is knowing who YOU are as a business and understanding what resonates with your audience – then finding innovative ways to connect.
The below ideas are a combination of strategy and tactics. You gotta define your brand before you can build your brand.
Build Your Brand’s Personality
Branding is all about giving your business a distinct presence online, to do that you have to figure out who YOU are. Ask yourself the tough questions: What kind of values do I want my small biz associated with? Any pet peeves or causes I’ll fight for? How should people perceive me in terms of tone & style – can they identify common themes here? Answer and expand on those answers and then use every chance you get (across social media, blogging, etc.) to showcase ’em.
Know Your Audience
Now that you know who you are, it’s equally as important to know who your audience is. Promote and share content your target audience is actually interested in and for the love of all that is holy, don’t be boring. For a deeper dive into this concept, we have another amazing blog (shocker) on this topic specifically.
Create All the Content
Publish blogs to your website your target audience won’t fall asleep reading. This will help bring traffic to your social media, build content for email marketing and give you great content to share on your LinkedIn profile. Content should be topics that are relevant to your business, industry or to your audience.
Be Innovative
Unless you live under a rock, you should know that social media is a great tool to build brand awareness. All we ask is, don’t be basic AF with your content. Find ways to stand out from the competition; be conversational and funny – funny always hits, unless it’s a serious topic like death. Unlike our boring corporate counterparts, you can be creative in the small business world.
Write LinkedIn articles and publish through the platform, you can also collaborate on articles written through LI. Make sure you’re also in groups on Facebook and LI relevant to your industry, then start posting and connecting.
Also, all your in-person networking needs to lead to online connections.
Connect
Small businesses love to support other small businesses and the community. Take advantage of that shit. Reach out to other small businesses to collab on your super cool ideas. Host a networking event at a local bar or restaurant and invite clients, colleagues, peeps from your LI connections – make sure it’s a cool theme. We threw a party before called “The Nothing Party,” it was held in February which as we all know is the nothing month.
The biggest takeaway is to get creative but you first need to understand why YOU exist; this will help form memes (these always hit), social posts & content worth sharing across all your marketing channels.
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