Small business owners are swimming in a sea of competition when it comes to marketing. With consumers finding themselves bombarded with promotions from thousands of brands, it’s more important than ever for small businesses to make sure they have an upper hand over their competitors in the marketing arena. Getting the word out about their business is no longer enough to achieve this edge. They’ve got to be able to effectively and consistently reinforce their message for their audience, an act that’s often easier said than done.
Marketing is critical to the success of a small business, and consistency is key. In this article, we’re going to break down five simple steps that any small business can take to successfully promote their brand – even in a competitive digital marketplace.
1. Define Your Brand
The first thing any small business must do is define their brand. Your brand is the image that is conjured in a customer’s head when they hear your company’s name. To define your brand, you must build the visual image you want to project to your customers.
Focus on your brand’s values, mission statement and target audience and build up the identity you want to establish. Start with a professional-looking logo that uses your brand’s colors. Be careful what you choose to go with because this will be used on all your future marketing materials and will become a symbol of your business. The colors you pick must reflect the brand personality you want to go with. Blue, for example, shows dependability and trust, while red is a sign of energy and excitement.
How to brand your business is a big decision. Don’t know where to start? You can simply pick a logo from a range of professionally-design logo templates by PosterMyWall, a free online graphic design tool, and customize it to suit your business. If you can’t find anything that meets your requirements, browsing through some professionally-designed templates can still spark ideas in your mind and help you figure out what exactly you need in a logo for your business. You can then bring those ideas to life in the free, easy-to-use PosterMyWall editor.
Once you have decided your branding elements, the same elements must then be consistently used across all platforms, from your website to social media, to conventional marketing avenues. This helps build credibility and trust with your audience and helps you grow your business.
2. Social Media Marketing
In today’s digital age, it’s more important than ever for small businesses to have a strong social media presence on all platforms that their target audience is active on, for example, Facebook and Instagram, in order to build a community and have a direct conversation with their audience. Not only that, but social media also helps to build brand awareness because they have a high chance of appearing before people who have not tried their product or business and is, therefore, a great opportunity to capitalize on this exposure and convert a new audience into loyal customers.
The top obstacles that prevent small businesses from consistently maintaining their social media profiles are limited time and resources. Graphic designers are expensive and creating good design from scratch is a waste of precious time that can be used in other marketing efforts. Fortunately, online tools can help here as well. For instance, PosterMyWall helps small business owners create stunning, professional-looking visuals for social media quickly, easily and affordably. Thousands of professionally designed social media graphic templates are available for small businesses, restaurants, and more. You can simply pick a template and customize it according to your brand by changing the text, fonts, imagery, and color scheme if you need to. You can also upload your own logo to the design. Moreover, with PosterMyWall, you don’t have to create the same image from scratch in different sizes for multiple social media platforms; simply hit the free Resize button in the editor to automatically resize to whichever size you choose from the extensive list of sizes.
This cost-effective solution also features sharing and collaboration tools that allow teams to work together on designs seamlessly. PosterMyWall has pay-as-you-go options that allow designs to be bought individually, but if you are a growing business that needs to create a lot of content, it would be more suitable to buy the Premium Plus subscription that allows unlimited image and video downloads. It also lets you share designs directly to social media and schedule posts for later – another feature that saves precious time and effort.
The bottom line is that PosterMyWall is a great way for small businesses to manage all their social media needs in one place – affordably. It makes the process super simple and efficient, even for people who do not have any prior design experience.
3. Spread the Word Locally
You should never underestimate the power of conventional marketing. Traditional marketing methods like distributing flyers and putting up posters are classic, tried-and-tested grassroots ways of getting the word out about your small business initially, and are an essential part of your marketing arsenal.
You can also design stunning flyers and posters with PosterMyWall by customizing any of their multitudes of templates. Whether you want to promote a launch, a sale, or simply spread the word, you will find a template suited to your needs.\
Local press release distribution about your launch can also be instrumental in creating hype and increasing your audience locally.
4. Leverage a Grand Opening
A grand opening event is a powerful way to hit the ground running and energize the launch of your business. It is important to make it a success because it is your first introduction to the community and your chance to make a good first impression and establish relationships with your audience. To make it successful, , be sure to hype up the event before the grand opening. This can be done with traditional marketing (think flyers and press releases), as well as rich social media marketing (frequent posts and events pages, for instance). You can make attractive flyers, posters, social media graphics and much more for your event with PosterMyWall. You can announce your grand opening with an elegantly designed Grand Opening template, and then keep the hype going by periodically sharing event schedules, teasers and ‘behind the scene’ videos to get people excited about the activities the event will feature.
You can also collaborate with local vendors to leverage the trust and authority they have established in the community to build your own and attract their consumer base to your business as well. This creates a mutually beneficial environment where you both reap benefits from one another.
5. Gift Certificates and Discount Vouchers
As a small business, one of the best ways you can promote your company will always be through word of mouth. This is perhaps best achieved by building relationships with your customers.
A great way to build relationships with your customers is to create a loyalty reward program to reward your customers for their patronage and give out gift certificates and discount vouchers. This puts the focus on a long term relationship as opposed to just a single transaction, ensuring that your customers will come back time and time again.
You can find hundreds of stunning gift certificate and discount voucher templates to customize for your brand on PosterMyWall. Add your own text, logo, and brand colors and you are good to go. You can even create seasonal themed gift certificates to embark on the holiday spirit and share the merriment with your customers.
If you’re getting repeat customers, the odds of them sharing the word about your company are much better!
The Bottom Line? Work Smarter, Not Harder
Promoting your small business successfully requires a lot of effort and consistency and that can get overwhelming. But platforms like PosterMyWall make the job of small business owners so much easier by offering thousands of beautiful customizable templates for marketing graphics, while also letting them build designs from scratch. With PosterMyWall’s resize, collaboration and sharing features, creating and sharing content has never been easier. And the best part? It’s very cost-effective.
Such platforms are revolutionizing the marketing game for small businesses. If you’ve been looking to raise the level of your marketing, then now is the time to get started. If you recognize the importance of consistent marketing, but you don’t have the time or resources to implement a truly flawless marketing campaign that spans various channels, then just know there are tools like PosterMyWall out there designed to help!