Great Marketing Ideas - 5 Proven Tactics Your Competitors Aren't Using

You've set up your business and the customers are trickling in

, but how can you turn the trickle into a flood? You know you need some great marketing ideas to boost your sales, but you don't have the budget for national advertising. Well here are some simple but effective ideas to help you get increased visibility for your small business.

Community Exposure

As a small business, your main source of customers may be local, from your own community. As a local business person you will already have a certain local profile - you will be well known to friends and neighbours, the trick is to leverage off that profile and generate a much stronger visibility for your business in the community.

A great marketing idea is to maximise your local advertising and promotion at the lowest cost. Here are just 5 examples to start you off:

- Make sure your car and van have highly identifiable logos/pictures/photos on the sides and back so everyone recognises you as you drive around. Have you ever followed a van down the road and smiled at the corny slogan or play-on-words on the back? Well it certainly grabbed your attention, didn't it, and I bet you can remember the name of the business, though you might have forgotten all the boring ones you saw.

- Wear a T-shirt, polo-shirt or sweatshirt to work with a neat logo promoting your brand or your business. These days you can get any logo embroidered, or any photo or design printed, on all manner of garments. It can look cute and corny, or smart and exclusive (think of bank employee uniforms), depending on how it is done, and this should match up with the image you want to portray of your business. You may even be able to claim tax-relief if the taxman accepts that it is only worn for work.

- Get to know your local schools and help them by sponsoring or running sports events or competitions; getting your name linked to the youth football league; providing a set of shirts for a sports team (with your logo on, of course!); or offering a prize in the name of your business, to be awarded to a top student (perhaps in a subject relevant to your business).

- If you have large premises which are not used at the weekends, or in the evenings - why not offer to let them be used for community meetings or events? Everyone who attends will be grateful to you for the use of the space, and you will have put your business's name at the forefront of their minds (make sure there are plenty of flyers for your business lying around, for people to pick up).

- Local radio stations are always in need of interesting items to fill their programmes. Make friends with the local DJs and presenters, make their lives easier by supplying them with interesting material about your local business, the people you employ, the work you are creating, the good works you are involved in, etc. The same applies to local newspapers or free-sheets - they always need good interesting material, which can act as free publicity for you, without you having to buy advertising space.

So you see great marketing ideas don't need to be expensive or complicated - these ideas show you that the simplest and cheapest can be just as effective and I'm sure you will be able to come up with lots more of your own, by brainstorming with your family, friends or employees.

by: Simon Lovell

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