Article Contributed by Sophia Quinn
If only it were enough to craft a winning product or service that just sells itself. Unfortunately, competition is stiff and the only way that today’s entrepreneurs can get any traction is by aggressively seeking out and expanding their audience.
In this post, we are going to explore a couple of powerful ways that you can amp up your small company’s voice and grab the attention of new potential customers. We’ll cover one of the most powerful online tactics along with an old-fashioned offline strategy that still delivers plenty of value.
Engage with Customers Online
Blogging and social media platforms present businesses with an excellent opportunity to expand their reach and tap into new audiences. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and a host of other social media sites are powerful tools on the 21st-century marketing stage. However, posts can easily go unnoticed if you haven’t gone to great lengths to build and engage with your social media fan base. Of course, it’s one thing to say this and quite another to actually achieve it.
The brilliance of social media marketing is the fact that your own followers are the ones out there sharing and ‘liking’ your posts and content. They’re doing the legwork for you. Assuming you have genuinely grabbed their attention, they’ll be providing your company with this service because they actually want to. In other words, they’ll do it for nothing in return. When your company’s subscribers and followers start pushing your marketing messages into viral territory – well, that’s when sales are going to hit a fever pitch.
Here are some tips for turning your company blog or social media account into a high-powered, audience-expanding marketing medium:
- Don’t blather on about your product features or the inner workings of your company; this may be interesting to you, but the average person probably doesn’t care.
- Provide links to relevant information and events, even if doing so doesn’t directly benefit your bottom line.
- Get the discussion moving by asking and answering questions.
- Offer preferential discounts and promotions to your followers (e.g. through a promotional code that they can use on your website); this is a real-value proposition, and people will take notice.
Provide Something of Value (For Free)
That’s right. Give stuff away. You operate a business, and your target customers understand that you’re in it to make money. That only makes this tactic all the more effective. Whether you’re passing promotional pens to advertise an upcoming sale or giving away product to loyal customers, the only thing that matters is that the items you put in their hands have some level of utility.
Tried-and-true promo campaigns like this have been around for eons, and they’re not going away anytime soon. The key is to understand the fact that the items you give away are – well, they’re more than just items. They serve a purpose in the hands of the recipient, and they also broadcast a clear and succinct message from your business. You can’t exercise total control over who gets their hands on these products, but you can certainly target certain demographics by carefully planning when, where and how you pass them out.
This tactic is backed by plenty of research. A survey conducted by the Promotional Products Association International found that nine out of ten people surveyed had at least one promotional product in their kitchen. More importantly, three-quarters of respondents were able to recall the product, advertiser and marketing message attached to a recent promotional product they had received. Those are encouraging figures, and they serve as an important reminder that brick-and-mortar marketing still has a powerful role to play in the Digital Age.
About the Author:
Article Contributed by Sophia Quinn of Dynamic Gift in Australia, a dependable provider of quality promotional products. They not only have promotional pens and other stationery, but also mugs, power banks, and magnets.