By Scott Humphrey
With a home based business you need to be aggressive in your marketing strategy to get you brand of the ground. There are a few different ways to do this that can be cost effective and keep you competitive. I recommend a two-pronged strategy that incorporates online marketing and offline materials that puts your brand in people’s hands.
No matter what you are selling, whether it’s your writing skills or fireworks, it’s a good idea to have a local strategy to get things rolling. Brand recognition is the key to building trust with potential customers, and the more your brand is seen, the more trust you will build up. The most straight forward way to get your brand out there is to do mailings in your local community.
Customized envelopes are easy to get online, and you can design the whole thing right on the website. The costs aren’t high, so make yours stand out; people are more likely to respond to colorful, catchy images and stylized fonts. Postcard mailers are also a good way to get your brand and product(s) seen because they don’t even need to be opened.
Business cards are of course a no brainer, and a very necessary tool of the self-employed. Personal networking is the most important
thing you can do to gain business, after all you are selling yourself as much as your product(s). Trade shows are a great place to schmooze and place cards in palms, just make sure you make an impression. Just handing out cards rarely results in a call.
Bumper stickers are another effective trade show giveaway. Bumper stickers are generally more effective when they are fun, so create on that gives your brand some personality so people will want to place them somewhere. I for one always read bumper stickers on the cars that have them, even if a car has like 15 of them. I’ll try to read them all if I am behind them at a red light. I’m always looking for something funny or entertaining.
Facebook and Google ads are a great way to get seen by a big audience, and having an online presence with a website and social media is the best way to build your brand. This strategy is a bit technical and requires some knowledge to get right and not cost you more money than you would like to spend, so it will require some good research or actually hiring a specialist when you can afford it.
Google records approximately 2 Billion searches a day so the key is to figure out which “keywords” that people are searching for relate to your brand, concept, and product and build an Adwords campaign around them. It would take an entire book; possibly many to explain this in detail so I can only recommend picking one of the many that have been written on it up and get started.
Facebook ad campaigns are similar to the set for Google but not as intricate. They have decent targeting ability and the bidding process is fairly easy to get right, so you can keep your operating costs reasonable. They target different crowds, people use Google for much different reasons than they use Facebook, and that should be taken into consideration when developing your strategy.
With a good logo, good products, and enough capital to give you what you need to get started you can achieve your goal of exposing your brand to the potential customers that are most likely to respond. Make your brand engaging and interesting, funny, or provide clear valid information with just enough flash to make it stand out. If you believe in your brand it will translate in the way you develop it.