Since starting my small business three years ago, I’ve learned so much about How To Market Your Small Business Without Selling.
It’s a fascinating subject, although being more aware of it means that I sometimes get tired of people trying to sell me things all the time.
The fact is that the constant barrage of ads and gimmicks in the world make it really difficult to make your own product stand out memorably and desirably.
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How To Market Your Small Business Without Selling
I’ve seen some interesting things in the past few days that illustrate the importance of adding value to people’s lives and giving more than you take when promoting your product or service.
I took my children to the county fair yesterday.
This year there was a new feature: Farmer’s Little Helper.
This is a hands-on exhibit that takes kids through feeding the animals, milking the cow, gathering eggs, tending a garden, picking apples, and ultimately selling these wares at a farmer’s market where they receive a “”dollar” to buy a small snack.
Several friends told me how great this free activity was, and my children certainly enjoyed it.
It was a great fair activity for preschoolers, a sometimes overlooked crowd.
In fact, I was so impressed with it that I was at least half-way through it before I noticed that the three shed/barns it was housed in were for sale.
Clever, I thought.
Parents are a more or less captive audience in there, and an audience that’s likely in a good mood because their kids are having fun.
My vote? 5 stars.
I also represented my blog at a Maker Fair this weekend. (“The greatest show and tell on earth”, they call Maker Fairs; I compare them to a science fair for all ages.)
I’ve done many events in the past with my other business, always selling something.
This time, my only task was to network this is the secret to How To Market Your Small Business Without Selling.
Instead of asking everyone to do something–buy–I offered entertainment in the form of building toys and storytime for their kids, interactive activities for them, and a paper bag house kit to take home.
I ran out early of kits early and on the whole felt like I had made people happy all day.
That’s pretty satisfying and, I believe, a good way to introduce my brand and provide URL’s for my Social Media accounts.
🙁 ran out of promotional materials at the Fair.
I usually order from Moo.com; love their products and their packaging always has cool little extras, too.
The real key to inexpensive or FREE promotion is use Social Media using Instagram.
Check out this eBook below.
What type of marketing do you feel is most effective?
How do you get people to notice your business?
Remember when YouTube was bought by Google?
They certainly knew, long before anyone else, that text was going to be usurped by images and that images were going to become the new language of the internet.
And, boy, were they right? Because videos are now the top search medium, with images a close second and poor old written text trailing a long way behind in a miserable third place.
And now it’s set to happen all over again – confirming Google’s original foresight about the ‘visual revolution’…
This time the visionary is the mega-traffic social site, FaceBook, who recently paid ONE BILLION dollars – cash – for photo sharing site, Instagram.
And if history teaches us anything it’s this: a business paying out these sorts of eye-watering sums isn’t goofing around, because they haven’t got much of a sense of humor – not where money is concerned!
So if we want to make serious money on line, we need to jump on the Instagram bandwagon – just as the folks who jumped on the YouTube bandwagon early enough benefited big.
And, if that hasn’t convinced you Instagram is for real, then allow me to tell you that world class brands as diverse as Starbucks, car maker Audi, Sharpie, and Victoria’s Secrets have entire departments devoted to sourcing, creating and putting a constant stream of tantalizing images on Instagram, promoting their products like gangbusters.
And, like FaceBook and every other top flight business they wouldn’t be spending big bucks if it wasn’t bringing home the bacon in the form of new, profitable business.
But – as heartening as that is… there’s a problem
Because it’s one thing to know the planet’s best brands are already profiting big time from hiring expensive skilled photographers and technicians, all dedicated to Instagram marketing. But – when you’re running a relatively small internet business – you simply can’t afford to tap into that high end level of expertise.
So how are you ever going to know what you need to do to compete – let alone how to do it?
Fear not…
Free eBook download “Instagram A New Marketing Frontier“ – Reap your own reward from this Billion-Dollar Deal.
Instagram Dominator 5.0 – The Ultimate Guide to building and marketing your business with Instagram – Click here to download
