Ideas for business promotion for SMEs

Borrowed from Neil Patel 
 

Comment on blogs : Leave comments on blogs that are related to your website and the comments you leave have to be insightful. Then people will not only read you but also head to your website.

Leverage message boards : There are millions of message boards on the net and if you give people good advice, it can drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Optimize your website for search engines : Through search engine optimization you can get more visitors to your website. You employ a search marketing firm or do it yourself by  reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and by following these link building tactics .

Start a blog : If you are going to create a blog for your company, host it on your domain name, write a good content and don’t constantly pitch your company in your posts. Create a community by responding to each blog comment.

Google local :  I decided to claim the Hyatt Hotel in Seattle (I live there) as my business location and when you search for the Hyatt Hotel in Seattle, my business comes up.

Leverage Social Networks : By sharing good content that you find while surfing the web and participating on the social web, you’ll quickly be able to build up your profiles. The key is to be patient as it can take 6 months to a year before your social profiles really become popular.

Become a guest author :  Write guest blog posts on other blogs. All of these blogs want is more content. If you write guest blog posts you will not only get traffic but also branding and the  links will help your SEO efforts.

Case Studies : If you already have happy customers, why not get a case study from them? Get them to talk about your product or service, how they used it, and the results they got.Case studies can help build credibility for your company, and get you new customers.

Write Beginner’s Guides : Do you remember when companies used to write White Papers? Although they are still effective, the new version of them are “beginner’s guides”. These guides vary in length, but the one thing they have in common is that they are thorough. By writing good content and giving it away for free, not only will you get a ton of traffic, but you’ll also get a lot of links.

Speak at conferences :  All you have to do is find these events and apply to speak.

Start an affiliate program : If you don’t have the money to spend on marketing, you can always get people to market for you for free. The only thing you have to do is pay people for each sale they bring to you. Think of it as performance based marketing.

Answer questions :  From forums to question and answer sites, people need help. If you can answer questions related to the products and services your company provides, you can get new customers. You can find these potential customers on forums on question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers.

Go to networking events : Some of the people you will meet will be useless, but a small percentage of the people you meet will turn into business relationships and friendships.

Talk shit :  The good part about having a blog is that it gives you an audience that you can communicate with. And when you tell them something, it will start spreading virally on the web.With my first company ACS, we provided marketing services. And when I saw companies that could use our help, I wouldn’t just reach out to them, but I would write a blog post on how they are messing up.

Give away the farm:  email companies and tell them in a step by step format of everything they need to change. Don’t be afraid to email companies and potential customers that you think you can help. What’s the worst thing that they can do… ignore your email?

Ask for referrals : Do you already have customers? If so, have you asked them for referrals? It’s a pretty effective approach as long as your current customers are happy with you. You’ll be shocked, only a very small percentage of your customers will not be willing to make an introduction. If a large portion tell you no, it means that you could be doing a better job making them happy.

Leverage You Tube : Not only do videos now appear in search results, but you also can use them to show how good your products actually are.

Offer steep discounts : A buddy of mine launched a concept called Tomato Battle, in which thousands of people get together and throw tomatoes at each other. When he launched the event he was charging 59 dollars for a ticket and his goal was to get a bit more than 2000 attendees. Within days he sold over 1000 tickets on these group buying sites and after the deal closed the people who bought tickets told their friends and those friends went directly to the Tomato Battle site and bought more tickets at the regular price. If you can come up with a price point that benefits you as well as the group buying companies, you can make a lot of money and gain access to a whole new set of customers.

Have exceptionally great customer service: One of the easiest ways to increase the lifetime value of your customers is to offer exceptionally great customer service. For example, Zappos will automatically upgrade your shipping to next day air every once in a while. And they also offer a 1 year return policy with little to no questions asked. By providing exceptionally great customer service, customers will not only be happy with you, but they’ll continue to come back. In the short run this may end up costing your company a bit more money, but in the long run you’ll see the benefit because each customer will not only spend more money with you, but they’ll tell their friends about the great experience they had with your company.

Get press : The more people that talk about your company in a positive way, the more people will come to your website and check out what you are offering. The hard part about press is that it’s not easy to get the attention of the major news outlets. But it is easy to get the attention of blogs. One way that I like to get press is to email bloggers asking if they would like to interview me. Although that sounds silly, a small percentage of the bloggers you email will say yes.Don’t be shy; ask bloggers if they would be interested in interviewing you. What’s the worse thing that can happen… they’ll say no?

Pay with a tweet : If you want more customers, then entice people to promote your company. Simply Measured does a great job of this by letting you signup for free if you tweet about their product. And as more people tweet, more people come to their website and signup. And once you are in their system, they get you hooked onto their software and they upsell you into paid plans. Start thinking outside of the box. Free users can market your company for you with a tweet, a plug on Facebook or any other social site. You just have to be willing to ask them for a plug on these social sites or else you won’t receive them.