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• 16 Oct

  Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business

  This post follows on from yesterday's post about Growing The Success Of Your Business, I have noted below a few more marketing ideas to grow your business that you might find helpful. None of them is rocket science - in most cases, it's just a case of putting in some effort, but in the right direction. So many businesses use a scattergun approach to marketing which can waste your resources and yield poor results.

  One of our Partners publishes low-cost marketing ideas via a site called: Free Marketing Ideas and there is a monthly marketing newsletter that you can subscribe to without any charge.

  So here are a few more thoughts:

  Keep In Touch With Your Prospects & Customers

  It takes so much effort to get a prospect yet so many businesses fail to keep in touch with their prospects, particularly after the initial sales lead goes cold. We purchased services from a company that kept us on their newsletter email list for 7 years before we finally bought. It costs very little to keep in contact with your prospects and/or introductory sources in this way. I am always astounded how few restaurants add you to their email list so that they can keep you up to date with offers and news about special evenings etc.

  Our own invoice finance newsletter (to which you can subscribe for free online) goes out monthly to our extensive list of prospective customers, existing customers and introductory sources. We use it to promote product offers and helpful articles from the finance companies that we deal with. I use one of many online platforms that allow you to publish email newsletters but there are other email services that are very similar. Once you exceed the free minimums you pay a small monthly subscription for the service, but we only really need one prospect to cover the cost of using the service. Even writing the content is simple, here are a few tips:

  • Add a subscription page to your website. Personally, I hate all the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-ups so I would suggest avoiding them.
  • Stick to a small number of articles such that the full versions are hosted on your website - in that way the newsletter drives traffic to your site.
  • Trail the articles with a link to read more.
  • Make the title of the email engaging - without sounding like a cheesy sales pitch.
  • Include a clear call to action to drive customers to contact you.

  Use Social Media Technology

  More and more businesses see the value in using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. in order to connect with new businesses. It sounds like a lot of work but there is plenty of social media technology that you can use to make the process simpler. There are services such as Hootsuite and Buffer that allow you to literally "buffer your posts" so that your social media feeds are updated regularly, even whilst you are out of the office or away.

  Here are a few social media tips:

  • Keep your posts relevant to your target audience.
  • Use hashtags e.g. #fundinvoice - as some services such as Twitter allow users to search for topic-related posts using hashtags.
  • Include links to your web pages to drive traffic to your site. There are URL shortening tools available as plugins for browsers such as Chrome that will do the shortening for you.
  • Include images where you can as they often stand out to people more than text.

  More to follow . . . if you need help with your marketing please get in touch with our partners that can help.

  By Glenn Blackman