There are hundreds of thousands of new businesses that are set up each year; however most of them never get off the ground, and those that do, often never manage to survive more than a year. But why is this? Surprisingly most of the time it isn’t even because the idea was particularly bad, it all depends on whether you can get noticed without breaking the bank.
So what can you do right from the start to ensure that your product gets some publicity without having to spend a fortune on billboard advertising, and internet marketing promotions? Well of course there are, you just have to be proactive about the situation. Use all the free methods to promote yourself right from the start and if you can use the cheapest possible methods to earn yourself a name, just put in hours and sweat instead of dollars.
Location
If you are a local business that will focus primarily on local people walking into your stores, or local business owners requiring your services you can start by simply finding a good central location in town where your store can be noticed. Again it is going to be a fine balance between price and location. If you are too far outside town, it will be cheap but you aren’t going to get any walk in customers. However, if you are right in the centre of town on the other hand, you will get noticed, but when your business has just started you might not have enough liquidity to keep everything afloat if the premises are too expensive. If on the other hand you are providing a remote service that you do not regularly meet with your clients, a business park out of the city will offer well equipped and cheap premises to start your business from.
Social Media
Start by using free methods to promote your business such as social media, if you are a local business, engage with whatever is going on in your community, even if it doesn’t pertain to a related industry, you might still want to comment on the event, in this way the local community can start to hear about you. On the other hand if you are offering a more widespread service, you are going to want to use social media to engage with the authorities in the internet, if you do this in a manner where you keep your tone professional, and you have to make sure that you offer relevant and cutting edge advice, in this fashion, people will recognize you as a good source of information.
Get Customers to Review Your Products
Some other less expensive ways of getting recognition, is to offer your products or services up for review. If you are focusing on the local community, why not offer some free samples just for walking in the store? This not only will allow people to get a look at your entire range of products but it will also allow them to take something home to show their friends and talk about. On the other hand if you are trying to have a more global reach you’re going to want to contact large magazines and websites that are very closely related to your niche to see if there are interested in writing about your service, you can send them a product to review, and they might want to send it to one of their readers as a gift once they have reviewed it.
The most important thing is to make sure you put your full faith and belief behind your idea, and until you have got enough money to promote it to a wider audience you are going to have to spend your time and effort instead to ensure that you have done everything you can to promote your product or service. After that if your product is good enough, it will sell itself.
This article was written by Kevin Donovan from www.businesstimes.org.uk, he often writes about how large-scale decisions made by governments and banks affect the outlook for our businesses both big and small on a daily basis.
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