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THE RIPE STUFF

10 Oct ‘19

7 Unique Small Business Digital Marketing Ideas to Try

10 Oct ‘19

In: Marketing, / By: Ripe Media

Does small business digital marketing have to be free? No, but it does have to be low-cost with a very high ROI. You can start spending big money when your business is scaling up and expanding.

While you are running a small-to-medium sized business, you can reap the benefits of low-cost digital marketing. Here are seven marketing ideas you may wish to try and each is low-cost with a reasonable return on your investment.

1. Pay For Guest Posting

As a small business with a limited online presence, you are probably tired of going “cap in hand” to other websites and asking them if they would accept a guest post from you.

We all know that guest posts and their backlinks are still as effective as ever at elevating the linked websites, even if the reasons why they are so powerful have changed over the years. Yet, messaging people and getting rejected or ignored is annoying.

Instead, hop onto a website like Freelancer.com, or even onto Craig’s List, and offer to pay people if they will put your guest post on their website. Show them that you are not trying to link to a spammy website, and you will have people coming to you “cap in hand” rather than you going begging to them.

2. Start A Rewards Referral Program

A good referral rewards program should be renamed a viral program because it reproduces on its own. The premise is fairly simple. You ask your customers to refer their friends to you. For referring, the customer gets a reward such as store credit. The person who is referred receives a big discount for their first order.

There are many other facets to a referral program that you can play with, but this idea is the essence of all that is needed. Show people that they will be rewarded for promoting your website and they will create more customers who in turn become referrers themselves.

3. Get Esoteric with Your Small Business Digital Marketing

Are you tired of trying to find groups on Facebook that suit your website or service? Have you been banned from most of them through no fault of your own? Maybe it is time to get esoteric. For example, Rick & Morty is big on Facebook at the moment, so dedicate a whole blog category to Rick & Morty and post its content on Facebook groups.

If you become invested in the content, you can exploit it and its fan base. Just make sure you actually invest in the subject and not try to exploit it like the cringeworthy moment during the 2016 US elections when Hillary Clinton said, “Let’s get students to Pokémon Go to the polling booths.” Find groups where your target audience lingers and start getting genuinely involved.

4. Start By Disagreeing

What is the most annoying thing about researching on Google? The problem is that things are always so one-sided. The top ten results show the same tired answers rewritten and yet if they worked, wouldn’t we all be a lot richer or more successful?

Take the example of Napoleon Hill whose books are still selling despite him being dead for decades. He sold easy answers, but they were so difficult to fault on the surface that nobody disagreed with him. It is only nowadays when people start questioning his logic for the faulty nonsense that his messages were.

Start your blog posts and even your ads by fighting what is seen as conventional wisdom. As President Trump said, “If you follow the crowd, you start from behind.”

5. Test Your Products To The Extreme

The Smart Car company did this brilliantly when they first released their tiny Smart cars to intense criticism. They repeatedly showed videos of their cars being tested to the limit, from throwing them off cliffs to hitting them with wrecking balls. Not only were their ads very effective, but they were also difficult to look away from.

Show what your products can do naturally and then show what they can do unnaturally. Just how many milk floats can your beds support? How long will it take a dog to tear a hole in your new elastic socks? How far away can people hear your fire alarms if they are stood in a desert?

Larger companies are often afraid to take such aggressive steps because they don’t want it to damage the impression of their brand. They don’t want to be seen to be encouraging others to use their products for the wrong reasons, but you are a small business with far less to lose and far more to gain from taking risks.

6. Become Part of a Community

Become more active in the online community. You often read marketing tips where you are told to contribute to groups, forums, Q&A websites, and hashtags, and yet in most cases, you are shunned and/or derided for doing so.

This is because you are not part of the community, you are an advertiser, you are a digital marketer. Become a part of their community, and you go from being a product pusher to a member offering an opinion.

7. Have Your QR Code Tattooed On Strangers

Okay, maybe tattooing your QR code is a little extreme, but you need to start spamming it offline. You need to get local, and QR codes are one way of spreading your website links around. You need to put it everywhere, from your posters in shop windows to lampposts with the quote “Your mum naked” underneath (or something as equally funny or provocative). Spamming online will have you punished, but nobody is monitoring the outside world unless you are littering.

Get people to your website using your QR code and be ruthless in how you do it. Hand out your QR code in the street if you wish, have it painted on your car, send out your kids with your QR code on their shirts. Get the traffic now and worry about your online reputation when you have an online reputation to lose.

Don’t Be Original

The more you try to be original, the more unoriginal and annoying you become. The most original small business digital marketing ideas started out as a sensible idea that was executed perfectly. Don’t try to be original. Come up with an idea, and then make it good, and then make it better. Think “30 minutes or free,” think “Got Milk,” think the Budweiser frogs.

Check out our marketing services for all the digital marketing expertise, advice and tips you will ever need. For your small business.

 

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