5 Effective Ways of Small Business Promotion

Whenever you start a small business, you have to introduce yourself to people, to the market and to the area. In the beginning, you do not have a lot of money to spend on marketing so you should look for cheap, but effective ways of promotion. A promotion campaign is the decider of the speed at which the business will spread. An effective promotion strategy should be carefully planned out, keeping in mind the targeted customers and the budget. There are several ways to promote a business. However, the best five ways which are cheap and effective are given below.



Online Marketing:
Online marketing is the fastest and most effective way of introducing yourself. Using social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook can give you a great platform to start spreading your business. This type of marketing is free and yet it allows you to connect to a worldwide audience. Facebook and Twitter have over a million active users. The main advantage of using these sites is that as you are connected to a huge network, it is easy for you to capture the target audience. Other than social media, you can give ads on websites. Some websites offer to place your ads on specific websites which are related to your products. This also helps attract a lot of customers, but you have to pay these service providers.
Website & SEO:
Designing and launching a website also helps you spread the word. However, there are two things you should keep in mind. First, your website should be designed by a professional developer and second, it should be optimized. When designing a website, there are several aspects which only a professional developer can cover. If he/she has enough experience your website can become better than expected. With online marketing you only have a few seconds to impress the client so  you should not take any risks with the design and development. When your website is launched it needs traffic; this is where search engine optimization is needed. SEO helps improve your website rankings in the search engines. When a user enters a specific keyword you have targeted, the first search entry will be your website. This way you will get more traffic and eventually your name will grow.
Promotional Products:
Another effective and cheap promotion method is using promotional products. Specific items are used to capture specific audiences. They are cheap so they allow great coverage; you can distribute them in several areas. This method is flexible in a way, if you want to target customers there are specific products and if you don’t want to target them you can spread any of these products and they will do their job. However, planning and distributing strategically improves results.
Special offers and giveaways:
Everyone loves a free gift or a special discount. For a new company it might be the best way to win clients. A free giveaway always gets customer appreciation. People love getting something new to try out the first time. If you are confident that your product or service is good enough, this way will be very effective.
Using SMS:
It is an odd, but extremely cost effective way of promotion. This is unethical, but those looking for a service or product you are offering would really appreciate this. You can send a description of your service/product or/plus a promotion code to make your message more meaningful for the customer.
About author: Tim is a branding consultant specialising in promotional
products. He strongly believes that branded promotional merchandise can do a lot more than expensive
advertising campaigns