I’ve recently warned small business on the packages being sold to launch business mobile applications. In these cunning sales packages, a business can have a mobile application built from as little as $99 per month.
In writing that post I found myself thinking, ‘What else can a small business do for $99 a month?’ When $99 struggles to cover a restaurant bill, it generally won’t buy you a pair of jeans and it certainly won’t cover the cost of taking your family out to the football. So can a small business develop a marketing strategy based around just $99 per month?
Well I tried to put together a 12 month marketing schedule that should fit under the $99 monthly budget and you know what, it wasn’t that hard to come up with. I will premise the strategy with a couple of points:
-Your own time has not been factored into the equation
- I have assumed you have basic computer skills
- Not all strategies outlined will be appropriate for all businesses
So here it is, my 12 month strategy to market your small business for $99 per month, it’s even in an order I suggest you should follow.
Month One - Collect Email Addresses
Get on the computer, put together an A4 form using Microsoft Word and start collecting your customer’s email addresses instore. Apart from your time, the only cost will be the paper and the ink that you use in your computer, so use the remainder of your $99 monthly budget to provide a prize for signing up.
Month Two - Start Sending an Email Newsletter
This is an obvious follow-up, time to start emailing your customers that you’ve signed up. I’m not suggesting an email like you would email your friend, I’m talking about distributing your own, professional email newsletter. Find a service provider, MailChimp is a great place to start, they have templates that just about anyone can customise and provide all the reporting and social sharing you could ask for.
Again apart from your time, the cost comes down to delivery and for your monthly $99 budget you can pre-purchase enough credits to send your monthly email newsletter to up to 275 people each month.
Month Three - Improve Your Website
Website check. It’s hard to include any developments to a website when talking about a $99 budget but if you can identify just a couple of small opportunities I am sure you can find a website developer that will help you make a few changes for your $99.
Some considerations to understand before contacting a designer/developer:
- Include a subscription form for your email newsletter
- Have you got a contact form?
- Have you got links to your social media?
- Can browsers find your website if they omit www when they type your URL?
- Is all the content fresh and relevant?
- Have you set up your Google Analytics?
Also while you’re at it, make sure you have a professional email address, i.e. [email protected]
Month Four - Start a Facebook Page
Start a Facebook page if you haven’t already. Tell your friends, once you get to 25 ‘Likes’ claim your username so you can promote www.facebook.com/yourbusiness. This can all be done for absolutely no cost. Shop around to find a graphic designer that will design a Facebook landing page for $99 - The landing page should be set up only for people who do not already ‘Like’ your page. It will increase conversions and make your business look ultra-professional and really progressive. Make sure the landing page grabs their attention to ensure they do ‘Like’ your page, tell them you will offer exclusive specials, run competitions, whatever is relevant to your business and your customers.
Month Five - Facebook Advertising
Next step is sticking with Facebook. All small business Facebook pages are going to need a kick-along at some stage, so it’s time to test out Facebook advertising. Have a budget of $9.90 for ten days. The advertising should have a call to action and should target a specific audience. If you didn’t know this already, you can be as specific as targeting English speaking women, aged between 35 and 40 and living within 10 miles of your suburb. You can even target people on their birthday and if they’re married or single. Of course you have that great landing page as well, so everyone clicking on your ad will see this and hopefully click again to ‘Like’ your page.
Month Six - Offline Promotion
You will have noticed that I have chosen to focus online thus far and there is a clear reason for this, it is effective and it’s more than often the cheapest alternative. But here I suggest trying to use offline to promote your online activities. It will cost initially but you want to steer them online, where ongoing communication costs peanuts.
Get a window decal designed and display it proudly on your front window if that’s appropriate for your business. If not you may need to get a flyer designed and have it distributed to your customers (if this is the case you can ignore a couple of the following months to keep to the budget). If you don’t have a shop window of sorts then throw your old business cards out and get a new batch, these should all include your website, your email, your LinkedIn profile and your Facebook page.
Month Seven - Joint Ventures
Investigate joint venture opportunities. Are there any other small businesses that have a natural connection with your business, or simply just in a great position to help promote your product or services? Go and see the owner and see if you can arrange a joint offer that would help promote both businesses. Then ask them to match your $99 and have a flyer designed and printed and obviously distributed at both locations.
Month Eight - Reinvigorate Your E-Newsletter
Let’s go back to the email newsletter. Hopefully everything is on track and you are about to put together your sixth edition. Let’s use the $99 to throw in another competition in the newsletter. It will help to provide your readers with more value and create a little buzz. But let’s be smart and integrate the competition, basically we’re looking at using the precious $99 to get the most benefit. Ask entrants to download an entry form from your Facebook page (this will require they ‘Like’ the page), or direct them to your website, just make sure you utilise the opportunity.
Month Nine - Create a Powerful Online Presentation
Find a graphic designer to help you produce a short, sharp Powerpoint presentation detailing your business and the advantages of using your business. For two hours work you should be able to find a designer to put together a handful of pages. The finished file can then be uploaded at Slideshare and they will provide you with an embed code which you can then feature on your website. You can also get the direct URL so that you can provide a link for your customers to check out or even better provide to your prospective customers.
Month Ten - Google Adwords Campaign
A one-week Google Adwords advertising campaign. Google Adwords is a great advertising option and whilst I would suggest getting an agency to manage your advertising, given a tight $99 budget, spend the time to work it out for yourself. Start with the Google Keyword Tool to research the best keywords for your business, develop a call to action, write the ad copy and start at $20 per day running from Mon-Fri depending on your business cycle. The advertising will drive extra traffic to your website and hopefully acquire you extra business. For your $99 budget you should get anywhere from 20 - 40 clicks through to your website. The test is to generate more than your advertising budget of $99.
Month Eleven - Third Party Listings
Optimise your key third-party listings. I am talking about your Google Places listing, if you’re in Australia I’m also talking about True Local and Hot Frog. Optimised third-party listings will increase your search engine performance and provide you with more quality leads to your website and business. Optimising requires more photos, more information and customer reviews.
I suggest you use your $99 in encouraging reviews, the rest you can do yourself. A few ideas include (all of which will be dependant on your business) running a competition to reward the five best reviews left on the nominated listings, using the money to design and print a couple of posters instore to encourage reviews, or maybe you can even provide $20 vouchers to the first five people to leave a review.
Month Twelve - Foursquare/Facebook Places
If you don’t already know, geo-location is potentially on the cusp of being one of those really effective marketing strategies. Basically, people use their smartphones (iPhone, Android & BlackBerry) to ‘check-in’ to a venue, from there they can leave tips, tell friends on Facebook and Twitter where they are and more.
Foursquare is the leader and hence this is where I suggest you concentrate your efforts. It’s completely free and therefore well worth claiming your business as a Foursquare venue and trialling a special. I would suggest starting with ‘Check-In and leave a Tip to Enter’ special. When a person checks-in, the special will come up on their screen, they leave a tip to enter and all of a sudden your Foursquare listing is starting to gain momentum. The special would of course reward them with the equivalent of a $99 prize.
I must note that the importance of this Foursquare activity is not just in the fact that you’re engaging your customers but it also provides you with free exposure when they tell they’re friends on Facebook & Twitter, and the competition will build online recommendations for your business. The latter is so important when consumers are researching your business.
Marketing for small business has always been difficult to navigate because of little time and smaller budgets. However, the landscape is vastly different now and the key message here is to ‘get creative’ and not simply keep doing what you’ve always done because there are opportunities out there.
If you need any help in navigating it all then of course I encourage you to contact me. After all one of the great benefits of the online world is the fact that much of us can do business from different ends of the globe.
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