With the Merchant Advance Rainy Day Giveaway in full swing (with only six days remaining to enter!) you may be wondering: what would I do with $15k worth of creative services from Skyrocket, Yulu and Bowery Creative? The possibilities are practically endless! Small business marketing often rewards bold, captivating and dynamic campaigns with one eye fixed on the perfect audience, and the other focused on the important data and information that you can glean from your customers. In case you're starved for ideas, here are six creative ways to raise your small business marketing plans to new heights!
- Host an Event: Hosting an event is a powerful way to get known by a lot of people at once. Why? Everybody comes over to thank the host. Hold the event at your place of business if you have a physical store, so people learn where you are.
- Chart New Frontiers: Recently, a local maker of healthy sports energy bars has taken to regularly pop-up-shopping their products and giving out samples right along the most popular Saturday-morning bike routes. Getting out into the world and situating your business in a new, unexpected context or location could attract a whole new customer profile.
- Upgrade your Email Marketing: Despite the recent anti-spam legislation changes, a vibrant email campaign is still an excellent way to reach, inform and incentivize your customers. Make emails or newsletters pop with enticing graphical elements, create calls to action and track your results with popular campaign management tools such as MailChimp and ConstantContact.
- Design It, Dream It: Can your brand reach consumers across a range of devices and platforms? Does your website look fantastic, no matter what screen size, orientation, or browser someone might view it on? Perhaps your customers want the full integration and immersion provided by a mobile app? User experience design should be on every small business marketing list of desirables.
- Tweet it Loud: Your small business marketing plan may already include social media, but are you getting the most out of it? Setting up promotional campaigns through social will increase your viewership, and the potential for user engagement outside of your existing follower base, by orders of magnitude.
- Get Ready For Your Close-Up: Video marketing has moved from the TV screen to the Youtube channel to the fifteen-second bite-size clip with enough flair and personality to capture your audience's attention. No matter the channel type, professional quality in production is worth its weight in gold. Video production can showcase the best of your small business, deliver authentic testimonials, show off new products, inform your customers, and do it all with style.
