Not getting enough customers to your business? Well, that would be annoying in any case but it would be much more frustrating if you have a small business and your livelihood depends on it. In most of the cases this condition occurs due to use of age-old marketing methods. The products, consumer behaviour, market environment, customer’s expectations change over the time and you have to modify your marketing methods accordingly to stay relevant.

Even if you have adequate customers to run a profitable business right now, this might happen to you in future if you are not flexible to change. Here in this article, we present you five business marketing ideas, that will not only help you in gaining more customers but also enable you to be updated with current trends and adapt yourself to get benefitted from the newest opportunities and technology. These are budget friendly methods, so any size of business can apply them.

Attend Industry Events:

There are plenty of trade shows, conferences, flea markets, workshops happening around you. It is a good idea to attend most of them. These evens bring many entrepreneurs together. You can network with business to business contacts at such events. If it is a flea market you will be exposed to a large number of direct customers who otherwise wouldn’t have known about you. Similar to flea markets you can get a good exposure by having a stall at trade shows. Even if you can’t afford a stall there you should visit the trade shows to know about your competitors, vendors and about overall business environment in your segment.

In addition to the possibility of getting new customers and making new connections, these events might help you to sharpen your sales skills. Getting in touch with like minded businesspersons, sharing ideas, attending seminars will help you keep updated. These events can also help you in developing industry partnerships.

Word of Mouth Marketing:

This might be an age-old strategy but for a small business or even for a big business to some scale, word of mouth is still an important marketing method. A customer is more likely to trust something he hears from a friend or family than what he hears on a television commercial.

If you are just starting your business in bellevue, the best way is to target your natural market first. Your natural market is your direct contacts. Segregate the potential customers among your contact, pitch them your products or services, you are most likely to make a sale here. Now your goal is to make these customers happy, so happy that they will themselves recommend your products to others. Do the same to every customer, and you will never have to worry about sales in future.

Social Media Engagement:

With the rise of social media, it is necessary for every business to have a social media presence. And to develop the trust in your brand, it is important that you keep engaging with the online community. Social media engagement ensures the customers and potential customers that somebody is there to listen to their complaints, wants and demands. It is always beneficial to engage in direct dialogue with your customers to understand their sentiments.

To drive more people to your social media accounts you can organize contests, offer coupons or discounts to your social media followers. You can leverage these number of followers to promote your new products, services, offers on existing products and drive actual sales.

Local listings:

It is your job to make it easy to reach you. Customers are very likely to buy from the first few options they find. Your presence in local listing directories will make it easy for your potential customers to find you.

Before going into all the local directories available, it is recommended to have a listing on Google my Business. It is free to list your business here. It will allow your business to point up on side panel of google search and on google maps. It will also enable your customers to leave reviews for your business here.

There are many other local listing sites where you should list your business like, yelp, mapquest, indiamart, etc. Some listing sites like Fact Reserve go beyond just listing your business, and help to promote it among their users.

Digital ads:

If you wish to make your brand travel faster, digital advertising is the most efficient way to do so. With digital ads you can target the specific group of people depending on their demography, online behaviour, purchasing power etc. This enables to reach the right people at right time and hence saves you from wasting the ad budget. Digital ads encompass many tools that help you manage, track, analyse and improve your online advertising campaigns. Unlike traditional advertising, the results of digital adverting are measurable.

Digital advertising is not just one thing, it has facebook ads, email marketing, youtube ads, twitter ads, linkedin ads, search engine marketing and many more options. You can choose one or make a combination of some of these as per your business needs.

Digital advertising is better choice for any business as it is affordable, scalable, targeted, specific, easy to use and it generates results quickly. You can use digital advertising to generate leads, get new customers, retarget the customers, increase sales, get existing customers to spend more and raise brand awareness in general.

These five business marketing ideas are so generic that no matter which business you are doing, these will be useful for you. Implementing these ideas in your business takes a very little effort and has the potential to generate huge results. Start with the things you can do for free, like local listings, social media engagement and word of mouth marketing. And then scale up your efforts by attending industry events and investing in digital ads. With a little creativity and effective implementation of the ideas mentioned here your small business can reach the heights you imagined within no time.