Customer Outreach for Your Small Business Made Easy And Affordable

An inexpensive promotional strategy that builds leads and sales to your business is the Holy Grail of marketing. On one hand, there are affordable marketing tactics available but rarely bring consistent results across all boards. On the other, advertising strategies that work normally cost a lot of money.

Striking the perfect balance between cheap and effective is difficult, but doable. Below are customer outreach ways to keep your marketing costs low while maximizing sales of your business.

Getting by Without Billboards

Billboards are designed to capture the attention of every passer-by (or 71%, to be accurate) due to its size and placement. However, buying a billboard ad space costs thousands of dollars. Promoting your startup or small business this way may not be the most financially responsible route to take at this point.

Solution: Instead a casting a wide net to catch the interest of potential customers through billboards, start by thinking small! To reduce the costs, turn your billboards into small-scale marketing tools to be sent out or distributed. Once printed, design a promotional campaign based on the target market who will receive the printed ads.

A few hundred flyers printed and delivered directly to your main target groups should do the trick. Is the young generation your main target? Well, get them into a few clubs and sports centers – it really is as easy as that!
Better yet, you can run a direct mail campaign to mail out brochures or postcards to people who are most likely to buy from you. By purchasing a mailing list related to your industry and creating a compelling print design to be sent out, you can drive more interest to your business and increase your sales.

To decrease costs for your direct mail campaign even more, USPS offers Every Door Direct Mail, which lets you send out mail to your neighborhood informing them of your newly opened store down the block. For more information on how to use this service, read this quick guide about EDDM.

Take Advantage of the Social Aspect in Social Media

Using Facebook and Twitter to promote your business has become standard fare – it’s free and allows you to tap your online audience. However, most businesses misuse the site by sharing spammy tweets and posts to people. According to BusinessWeek, around 40% of registered accounts and 8% of all messages on Twitter are spam.

Solution: These bad practices prevent you from optimizing your online brand for increased leads and sales, which is why you need to use your social media for its true intent and purpose – by being authentic and sociable.

Aside from following the best social media practices, sending direct messages to your Twitter and Facebook contacts is another way to develop interaction and engagement to your brand. Search for people looking for products and services and let them know that your business offers them. Continue interacting with them by sending out blog posts and practical tips related to your business they will find useful. Use lead generation tools for social media to streamline the process and get leads faster.

Moving away from your customers for a moment, you can also build your network of like-minded people who share the same passion for your job. Share advice, brainstorm ideas on how to develop better marketing strategies, and from business relationships at Facebook Groups you join in. Search for people similar to you at Twitter and do the same. Also, don’t forget LinkedIn Groups and the relatively new Google+ Communities to maximize your online channels for networking.

Having little money to throw at marketing forces you to be creative with your promotional strategy. As they say, if there is a will, there is a way – and it is guaranteed that you are going to find it if you just take a step back, evaluate who your target audiences are, and choose the ideal way of approaching them. Rest assured – your quest for marketing glory will be over once you achieve these.

Author Bio

Lewis Edward is one of the founders of The Office Providers and likes to spend his spare time by writing about offices space and general business topics. You can visit his website in order to learn more about him and his company, or click here to start a search for the ideal office space for your business.