Finding the ideal marketing strategy for your home-based business is one of the critical aspects for running a successful business. The ideal set of marketing tools is inexpensive and able to reach the largest potential audience of people who are interested in buying your products and services.
If you start a simple Google search, you will have a hard time selecting from the various marketing suites, offering various benefits and functionalities at various prices. Before you settle for any kind of paid marketing tool, you should make sure that you make the most of the basic ones, which are either free or very affordable.
As a home-based business owner, every cent spent during the start-up phase of your business is money taken from your own savings and from your family’s budget, so you should think twice before you sign up for any payment plan. Thus, before you do anything that could impact your finances, you should make sure that you are using these effective and cheap marketing tools:
1. Social Media
Yes, we have been talking a lot about marketing your business on social media, building a close relationship with your followers and potential customers. But this is probably the first time that we are stating it aloud that social media – any platform you are using – represents the biggest, most effective and most affordable marketing tool.
Whether you invest money in ads or promoted posts, or you try to increase the reach and exposure of your business through organic growth strategies, using social media is the first and foremost marketing strategy in the current business world.
2. Email
Email was, practically, the first form of direct messaging. It allowed people to communicate with each other at zero cost (apart from the internet subscription) from any corner of the world. Today, having an email address is a must – it is just as important as your home address or company headquarters. From top entrepreneurs and company CEOs to regular people, we cannot imagine exchanging correspondence or being informed of topics of interest in any other way than through emails.
Email marketing is still alive and well – both for home-based businesses and large corporations. Newsletters, direct response email, and various special offers sent by email get a high conversion rate for a very affordable fee for opening an account with one of the reputable email clients (such as MailChimp).
3. Local Listings
As start-up home-based business, you should focus on reaching out to your local community in the beginning. Local directories, Google Maps and Yahoo Local are some of the most important local listings where you should include your business. The reason for this option is that when someone starts searching for various products and services, businesses situated in their local area will show up first among the search results.
4. Customer Referral Programs
Perhaps one of the most efficient ways to market your business, customer referrals work great for any type of business. The reason for this is that the person’s reputation adds to your company’s. When someone recommends a business, product or service to their family, friends and acquaintances, they add the unspoken guarantee that they vouch for the quality of customer service and professionalism of that business.
5. Bloggers
Influential bloggers are not easy to find, but they can be a great launching board for your business if they accept to post links or banners pointing at your website, or write a product or business review. When you start approaching bloggers, you should make sure that the topics they write about have something in common with your niche. Otherwise, even if the blogger accepts to feature your business on their website, their readers will not be very impressed with your ads and you will get a lower conversion rate.
As you can see, we have focused on what we may call, in this age, traditional marketing tools. However, they are still very effective and will not burden your start-up budget.