By Leonardo Wood
Marketing doesn't have to be expensive, in fact some of the greatest and most powerful forms of marketing cost no money to implement. If you are willing to spend some time working on your marketing it will make a real difference to your business.
When times are hard the phone stops ringing, so what are you going to do about it? Give marketing for free a try before you start sacking people.
Here's a list of ways you can market your business for free:
Call your previous customers - They are the easiest people to sell your products and services to.
Networking - Get out there, meet people and spread the word, if you are quiet you may feel deflated, but you just need to get out there and promote yourself.
Stop Advertising - I don't mean stop advertising altogether I just mean stop advertising in the places where you are not sure if its working or not and spend the money you save on testing other forms of marketing and advertising.
PR - Get in the media talking about what you know best, your trade or business etc. You are an expert on what you do and the media will feature you if you have something of interest to say.
Check out the stories already in the papers etc to see if you can piggy back any of the stories that are already in the news.
The Papers need stories and there is no reason why you can't get your business some free publicity.
Upselling - This is a great FREE way of getting more from your sales, at the exact point that someone buys from you they need to be offered something else which will increase the amount of money they spend with you.
You could offer a more expensive version of the original product or maybe an extra service that compliments the original purchase.
What else can you offer your customers at the point of purchase?
Emails - Are you regularly emailing your previous customers and potential customers? It will help you get more work and it costs nothing to implement.
Testing - You need to test and measure your existing marketing and advertising to see if its working or not, it costs nothing to test and it helps to eliminate ineffective advertising and marketing.
You need to keep track of where your calls come from, how many leads are generated from a particular ad, how many sales are converted and how much profit was made as a direct result of each ad.
If you do not have the answers to these questions how are you going to know whether or not you are throwing your money in the bin.
There is no excuse for not implementing the strategies above. Go for it!
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