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I learned long ago that if you don't market your business, you don't have a business to market for long. I market my blogs and consulting businesses religiously, but I do it on a budget and by staying ahead of the technology curve using five hot, 100 percent online trends.
Use deals and rewards programs as incentives
Contests, rewards and discounts; these are the elements upon which customer loyalty is built. Deal hunters are everywhere, in any kind of economy and they are always on the prowl. I learned by rewarding the deal hunters, the rest of the popular follow shortly thereafter because hunters are also sharers. On my fan pages or websites, I promote deals. Some of those deals are homegrown, others are shared from across the web. Either way, folks know my brand is the place to go when they want to save a buck and it doesn't cost me a dime up front to market this way. In fact, deals are so powerful that my visitors love sharing them across the web.
Mobile marketing to smart phones.
My smart phone is surgically grafted to my palm, and by the looks of what I see from the market to the mall, I'm not the only one. I started using SMS text campaigns and contracted a geek to build a web app for my consulting business. This has boosted my web traffic and customer base for just pennies a day out of pocket.
Email marketing.
Email isn't dead. Not yet, anyway. And it's cheap, easy advertising. What's different about marketing via email today via the email marketing of yesteryear is that now, I only market with permission. If you give customers incentives on your website or social media pages to sign up for email newsletters by offering "exclusive" deals or content, you find yourself with more subscribers, and subscribers that pay more attention.
Shop local, advertise local.
If 10 years in sales taught me anything it's that people love to do business with people they know and people they trust. Since it's complicated to go have cup of coffee with someone half-way across the world, (unless they Skype) I opted to take out local web ads for my business. They are cheap and give me tons of visibility. Many marketers forget how hot the local market is because they are focusing on national campaigns where their ad often gets lost. I am building my brand locally first, and then branching out.
Social media pages.
I Facebook, I Twitter, I Digg, I LinkIn, I Stumble and I do all of that other crazy stuff that you do online too, except I do it for my businesses as well. Each one of my virtual empires has its own website, fan page, Twitter account and all of the other technological goodies you would expect from today's virtual corporations. I link all of my social media to each website, intertwining them and making them easy to manage and update. This emerging trend is one my business would be dead in the water without.
Marketing is the lifeblood of any business, and good marketing means better business health.
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