Here are six low-cost tips from marketing experts on how to raise your business’ profile.

Get out there!

If the marketing budget is tight, shift your marketing spend from traditional advertising to public relations activities.

Coffee with Clients

Companies should review their value to clients and use this information to help grow their firm profitability for the future. Small businesses should ask themselves why clients use them over your competitors. Who are the most profitable clients? What is the growth potential of your existing clients and how can you profile future potential clients?

Instead of hiring a market research firm, businesses should spend “$3 and 45 minutes” having coffee with key clients to understand their needs and issues.

Speaking to the client and trying to work out solutions to problems leads to innovation and better ways of doing things.

Use LinkedIn

Businesses should find and get involved in LinkedIn groups that relate to their industry, says Chris Dale of Marketing HQ.

For example, “you might be a sales training expert. There are a lot of LinkedIn groups there where people actually ask for advice. As a person who provides that advice you can go on there and answer those questions and build your profile that way.”

This generates interest in your profile and people can look at potentially engaging you from a business point of view.

LinkedIn is growing rapidly, and is becoming the destination for business to business transactions, particularly if you’re a small business owner.

Just as businesses often search for professional services on LinkedIn, consumers and businesses often ask their contacts via Twitter or Facebook if they need help finding a supplier.

“You can actually search on Twitter to find people who are asking those sort of questions and then use that to say ‘Hey, I can help you with that’,” says Dale.

“The cheapest way to update your website is just to update the text,” says Dean Parker of Four P’s Marketing Solutions.

Websites should use a call to action to direct potential customers to the contacts page and to call the business. Questions such as “how can we help you?” or “what’s the best product for me?” are most effective.

They should avoid focussing on product specifications, and instead focus on customers’ needs. “What’s in it for me? You’ve got to talk to the customer and outline the benefits,” says Parker.

He gives the example of a plumber client who boasted on his website that he used 100mm pipe. The fact is of little interest to home owners, until it’s explained to them that those pipe will carry more storm water away meaning there’s less chance of the house flooding.

Emailing out regular newsletters is a good way of staying in touch with past clients, who are more likely to buy from a business they’ve already dealt with before, says Anthony Idle of Balance Business Coaching. Free services such as Mail Chimp can automate the process.

Idle says it costs twelve times as much to win business from a new client as it does from a past client. “If you think about the buying process, it normally goes ‘know me, like me, trust me, and buy from me’.”

Businesses are also more likely to be able to upsell to existing customers.
    
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