Today’s businesses suffer from one giant dilemma—they need to reach more customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace and they also have tight budgets that demand results. It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that this is a huge problem for many businesses. In an ideal world, you could just throw unlimited amounts of money into your marketing budget, yet this isn’t possible.
When money is abundant, businesses tend to make choices that aren’t as effective or pragmatic. In this way, a tight budget may be beneficial in helping you create a concise marketing plan that targets customers that will actually purchase your products or ask for your service rather than just be aware of them. Here are a few basic ideas for marketing campaigns for under $100 to help you get started in expanding your business.
To begin with, make use of marketing materials that don’t cost anything. The best way to do this is using Internet tools that help you create word of mouth about your business without having to spend. There are many websites that people use for social networking that your business can use such as Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. These websites allow you to post information about your business—upcoming events, new products, change of service—for free and anyone connected to your business and anyone connected to them will hear about it. Use this as a soft campaign to generate awareness of your business to a huge customer base.
Another option is to set up an informational website associated with your business. Whatever you sell—cookies, janitorial service, or stiletto heels—you can create a website that helps people learn more about your realm of service and products without directly selling to them. This may seem contradictory, but many people research on the Web before purchasing products or services. If they happen to learn what makes a great cookie on your website, they’re more likely to buy from you when they’re ready. These sites are easy to set up (you already know everything) and they don’t take much to maintain since there’s no e-commerce applications, just simple text, pictures, and maybe video.
Work with companies that do targeted advertising online. Unless you’re selling a very general product, you probably do business with very interested people. In order for you to get customers who are serious buyers you need to go where they go. It’s expensive to post ads in magazines, but it is much less expensive to post ads with companies that will only charge you based on the number of times the ad is shown on a webpage that is topically related to your business. These companies greatly reduce your costs and you are only paying to advertise to people who are likely to buy.
Generally speaking, think of the modern marketing campaign this way—getting the word out to the public should be free and advertising to customers should be done directly based on their interests. The Web has revolutionized business in so many ways—there’s no reason it can’t save you money as well.
With summer in full force it has been a while since I have taken the time to show some of the gems that I have found in the world of guerrilla marketing and innovative ideas for business. Enjoy!
Giant Broccoli
For Tibits, a Swiss vegetarian restaurant chain, oversized forks were installed on to trees in major parks and in outdoor shopping areas all over Switzerland, The freshness of Tibits food could be demonstrated to people walking by. and hey for a guy who actually likes broccoli, it made me hungry.
Agency: Wirz/BBDO, Switzerland.
The Haunting Girl
During the fist phase of this campaign from New Zealand, die cut images of a haunting little girl were plastered around the city. The real size cut outs were spread out so that the little girl would seem almost omnipresent, like a spirit haunting the area. This teaser phase caught people’s attention during 2 weeks as no message, logo or signature appeared on the visual. Then during week three of the campaign a sticker was placed over the girl revealing the line, “The kids you kill never leave you “Slow down near schools.” Agency: Colenso BBDO, New Zealand.
Have a great weekend.
Do you believe in magic? If you do, that’s great—it means you’ve got a youthful spirit, and that will invariably help you to live a longer and happier life. However, you should probably dispel any notions of magic when it comes to your website. If you don’t do any marketing for it, you’re certainly not going to magically attain site traffic.
Getting Internet users to visit a website is consistently one of the most difficult tasks a small-business owner can undertake because of the time and money involved. However, if you plan on surviving on the Web, you will need to make efforts to optimize your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) starts with a properly designed website. Now, it may be extremely tempting to make your own website through the site builders that you are usually provided with through your site hosting service, and this may be your only option starting off as a bootstrapped business, but your site will fall significantly short of effective optimization. You see, there’s a wonderfully intricate world of coding and design techniques behind the curtains of your website. These features help search engines find the relevant content within your site and naturally rank them higher in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
So, as much as you might be able to save a few bucks designing your own site, you’d be better off saving yourself a significant amount of time by creating a single home page as an online business card; a credibility measure for people checking out your business. Then, when you get some positive cash flow going, you should put serious consideration into hiring a professional Web designer to help you out. Unfortunately, you may feel a little nauseous when you see how much it can potentially cost you to get a quality website up and running. However, if a site is properly designed and optimized, the front-end costs will be justified by the business it brings you on the back end.
And if you finally get the cash flow to make such a purpose possible, you’ll want to make sure you don’t just jump in with the first option you come across, getting sucked in by the appeal of virtual bells and whistles. Absolutely always look for live samples of a site designer’s work. In addition, you should make sure you ask them about what measures they take to optimize your site’s design. If they can’t provide you with specific information regarding optimization, then chances are they’re just providing you with a cookie-cutter template, and that’s most certainly not worth the heavy price tag.
And as was mentioned in a previous article, if you can’t afford a necessary item for your business, barter before you go broke. Before you opt for outside professional help with your website, look through your list of friends and business contacts to see if there’s someone who can trade services with you. Site design is one of my specialties, so I welcome any and all questions you might have on this topic—I’d love to help steer you in the right direction!
Well seeing as it is Monday again and we have to come back inside after enjoying a spring weekend (we just got rid of our snow and finally our spring fever).
I figured I would continue on with my favorite Guerrilla Marketing Campaigns that I have found around the web. Happy Monday everyone!
Ego Boost
I love when simple concepts are the ones that make the biggest impact. This one is fun, innovative and feeds male ego at the same time.
Jaws Eats Bus Passengers
I am huge fan of the vehicle wrap. When done well you will always get attention. Your audience is bored waiting in traffic, it has movement and it is memorable. All the makings of a campaign that will be talked about at dinner tables and push your message along.
Half a Bus Stop
The last time I had a blog post that had the message to use less we had a huge discussion about green marketing and the merits and morals of advertising.
The impact this one creates is great. One of the best ways to get attention is to take a familiar object and turn it’s concept upside down. Good job Denver Water!
Is IKEA taking over the world
It would seem that I have accidentally created a public transit guerrilla marketing post I will continue with the theme. As the one above it is a great job of taking the familiar and playing with perception. I hope that it does not rain.
Well I have dug through the archives to bring you some more great guerrilla marketing and innovative ad campaigns. We had a lot of discussion last week about pushing social, religious and political agenda’s in marketing. Many thanks to those that participated and I am excited to hear about what we think of these ones.
Guerrilla Teeth
What a great idea this one is, it really hits the message home in my opinion. After being a bit disgusted you can’t help but smile at this one. I am going to look to see if I can find some statistics on how the response was for the company.
Playful Playboy
This one feeds most boy’s imagination, some girl’s ego and for the rest it will generate conversation. This is a guerrilla campaign that could be used for both traditional and viral marketing for many years to come. You can get a lot of traction out of this one.
Virgin Virgin Virgin
I have had a lifelong fascination with everything Virgin. Richard Branson’s marketing and PR stunts are the best in the world. I bow down to “The Master of Branding”.
This one gave me a bit of trouble when I first saw it. I see it for it’s brilliance but have a problem with using historical monuments for commercial advertisements. I would like to hear your thoughts on this?
Maybe I am just being sensitive with this one!
Pothole Application. Does it cross the line.
As you all know I am big fan of pushing the limits of creativity and how to get your message out to the masses but when we get to a point when we endanger public safety that is where the line has to be drawn. With the adhesives and quality of the graphics we can create now something like this could cause accidents, injury and possibly death. I am pretty sure that is not the legacy that the company wants for there marketing.
That is it for this time, if you have any campaigns that you would like to see me feature in this series of posts, let me know.