10 ways to advertise your brand – without breaking the bank

It’s almost impossible to achieve success for your brand if you don’t promote it, and yet, a company’s marketing costs can rapidly become very scary indeed. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to get your brand perpetuated far and wide without blowing a bigger hole in your business’s wallet than you can afford.

1. Print business cards

We may be living in a digital age, but if anything, that simply makes traditional business cards more effective – they introduce a sense of interaction and professionalism that even a great business website can’t always match.

2. Maintain a social media presence

In a world consisting of some 7.3 billion people as of July 2015, it’s quite incredible that 2.3 billion of them are active users of social media. Quite frankly, you can’t ignore social media if you wish to achieve any real business success, as you could otherwise be barring yourself from a massive chunk of your target audience.

3. Partner with another business

Developing a partnership with another business can be of mutual benefit to how widely both become known. For instance, if your business sells cars, you might link up with a nearby car service centre and direct your customers enquiring about maintenance to the service centre, which could, in turn, recommend your business as a place for its customers to buy or sell their next car.

4. Get blogging

Setting up and maintaining a company blog is a great way to build a reputation for your business as an authority in its field. There are potential benefits for your firm’s search engine rankings too, as Google prefers sites that have the high quality, regularly updated content that an active blog can produce.

5. Launch an email marketing campaign

Many business owners wrongly presume email marketing as a marketing discipline to be pretty much ‘dead and gone’, but they couldn’t be more wrong – indeed, a recent UK digital marketing report from Smart Insights found that 51% of marketers rated email marketing as their most effective channel.

6. Request reviews from customers

In today’s world, so much of your company’s marketing can be done for you, by your own satisfied customers. Simply by asking those who had a positive experience with you to leave a review on one of the many popular review sites such as TripAdvisor, you can help to increase the trust that prospective customers have in your brand when they see such reviews.

7. Get networking

You might not like the idea of having to mingle and ‘schmooze’, but networking is another essential thing to business success – even just getting yourself out there helps to create those connections, gain that insight and develop the brand recognition that could make or break your business.

8. Put out some special offers

Everyone loves a special offer, and such deals can also help to associate your brand with all of the right things – as long as you stick to certain ground rules. You should never hide important details, for instance, and nor should you over-promote your offers to such an extent that your company gains a ‘spammy’ reputation.

9. Embrace video

Video’s ‘time’ as a marketing method has truly come, with small business owners realising that the average website visitor is more likely to sit around watching a few seconds or minutes of footage than trawl through paragraphs of text. So why not use it to show off your business ‘behind the scenes’ or provide your audience with useful and relevant ‘how to’ guides and tutorials?

10. Have a profile on industry-relevant sites

For insight into how much value a presence on an industry-relevant site can have, check out hotel reservation software Eviivo’s analysis of whether its hotel or B&B clients are better off paying the commission associated with travel agency websites, or doing their own marketing to generate bookings. It found that for every £1 spent on a travel website like Expedia or LateRooms, at least £5 of business is generated.

Remember that you don’t need to take the ‘flashy and expensive’ approach to generate an incredible ROI for your business. The simplest measures can so often be the most effective, although of course, you still need to ensure that you use them appropriately if you are to achieve the best results.