As a small business owner, you know that marketing is essential to your success. But what are the best marketing strategies for small businesses in 2022?
In this blog post, we will discuss 29 creative marketing ideas for small businesses that you can use to generate more traffic and sales for your business. We will cover both free and paid methods, so you can choose the strategies that work best for your business.
You don't need a marketing plan or a content marketing strategy calendar to get started. Simply start with one or two free marketing ideas that fit your business and add new marketing ideas as you see success with the initial ones.
Let's get started!
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Build a Referral Program for Your Existing Customers:
Small businesses can benefit from customer referrals. In fact, 92% of customers are more likely to trust a referral than an advertisement. That's why it's important to create a referral program for your existing customers.
Your referral program should be easy to participate in and offer incentives for customers who refer their friends. Some common incentives include discounts, free products, or exclusive access to new products.
Post your referral programs frequently on your social media accounts and you will build a list of the free sales team for your business overnight who will spread and rave about your product and service to their family. Word of mouth marketing is underrated but most effective and free and creating a referral program will make it much more attractive.
Connect With Social Media Influencers Within Your Niche
Influencer marketing is a big industry. There's no need to seek the Kardashians of the world. You can easily find a large number of micro-influencers with engaged audiences on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat (and without the million-dollar price tag.)
Connect to the influencers who already have a pre-existing relationship with your target audience. Then offer to send them your goods or pursue a more formal marketing connection. If you don't want to spend hours searching through the right influencers there are platforms that can help you to find the best influencer for your niche within your budget.
Host Giveaways Regularly
Hosting a giveaway is a great way to increase engagement with your brand and attract new customers. In order to host a successful giveaway, you need to make sure you offer something your target audience will be interested in.
Hosting a giveaway is a great way to increase engagement with your brand and attract new customers. In order to host a successful giveaway, you need to make sure you offer something your target audience will be interested in.
Collaborate With Other Brands In Your Niche
There's power in numbers. Combine forces with a brand or account that complements your own but isn't directly competing with you. Create a collaboration project, collaborate for a charity, or simply sponsor each other on social media through a sponsored post. It's sort of like scratching each other's back.
Share Your Customer's Testimonial
If you have a satisfied customer, ask if they would be willing to provide a testimonial. Testimonials can help to persuade potential customers to do business with you.
You can share your customer's testimonials on your social media accounts or your website. You can also use them in your marketing materials as well if you decide to run ads in the future.
Go Live On Facebook and Instagram
Live video has become increasingly popular on Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms offer live streaming features that allow users to go live from your business page or your personal account.
Live video is a great way to connect with your audience and promote your brand. You can use live video to answer questions from your followers, showcase your products or services, talk about your upcoming launch, or simply connect with your audience on a personal level.
Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots
Facebook Messenger chatbots are a great way to connect with your customers and promote your brand. You can use chatbots to send automated messages to your customers, and you can also use them to run ads.
Chatbots are a great way to connect with your customers on a personal level. You can use them to answer questions from your customers, provide customer support, or simply keep your customers updated on your latest news.
Use Instagram Reels
Instagram reels are a great way to showcase your products and services. You can create a reel by compiling a series of short videos that tell a story about your business. This can be a great way to engage your audience and promote your brand.
Instagram is competing with Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube to keep their users coming back to their platform and the reels are getting a lot of easy views right now.
Connect Your Online Store With Instagram
If you have a Shopify store online, connecting your website to Instagram can be a great way to drive free traffic and get sales. That way when your followers see photos of your products on Instagram, they'll be able to click through to your website or buy your product directly through Instagram if you set it up properly.
A lot of big brands are using this marketing strategy to drive a lot of free sales for their brand every day.
Organize an Influencer Takeover On Instagram
Instagram was built by influencers. A well-timed influencer takeover is difficult to compete with because of their existing loyal fans and audiences. Many of the followers of that individual influencer will flock to your page to find out what their favorite influencer is up to, and many will follow you and become your fan for life.
If an influencer is a good match for your company, a takeover will take you a long way and will increase your brand loyalty overnight.
Create Interactive Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are a great way to engage your audience and promote your brand. You can use Instagram Stories to create interactive stories that show off your product or service and add a poll to find out if you have a winner or loser.
You can use create short videos of your product, add them to your Instagram story and add a simple poll to question to drive massive audience engagement on your post. But don't overdo it as making these types of social media posts may turn off your audience.
Launch A Viral Product Video On YouTube
A viral product video can be a great way to promote your product or service. A viral video can help to increase awareness of your product and make your product an overnight success. This is a marketing strategy used by very few because it's hard to nail down sometimes but if you can do one effectively you will see a massive result.
Remember the ads from Dollar Shave Club that took a no known company to an industry behemoth that was sold for $1 billion dollars to Universal.
You can create a viral product video by using humor, shock value, or by tapping into current trends. You can get thousands of shares overnight and get a lot of subscribers that will stick with you for a long long time.
Create Product Demos and How to Videos
On YouTube, you can learn how to replace a tire or repair a washing machine. In the tutorial world, share your knowledge. Viewers will enjoy the material, and you will become an authority in your field. Your company will already have their confidence when these same viewers go to your website to buy something from you.
This is one of the highly leveraged marketing strategies that helped a lot of influencers to turn their hobby into a successful business when they become a trusted authority in their field.
Create YouTube Shorts While It's Hot
Creating YouTube shorts is a great way to get your company’s name out there. You can create short 1 mins product demos and post them as YouTube Shorts which are getting a lot of free views right now since YouTube is competing with Instagram Reels and TikTok short videos.
You can gain a lot of viewers and subscribers from these YouTube shorts who then can see your longer video demos. You can also use these shorts to answer questions from your viewers and subscribers.
Showcase Your Product In TikTok
As a small business, you may want to consider using TikTok to showcase your product. TikTok is a social media app that is growing in popularity, and it is a great platform to reach a younger audience.
You can use TikTok to create short videos that show off your product or service. You can also use the app to run ads. TikTok is a great way to reach a new audience and promote your brand.
Start A TikTok Challenge
TikTokers love a good challenge more than anything. Anyone can start a TikTok challenge with an interesting idea with a very small following. Create your TikTok Account and post a video with a challenge, pick a related hashtag for your niche and product, and add a call to action for your followers to pick up the trend.
Make it an interesting and easy-to-do kind of challenge and will see a flood of followers joining a challenge for free overnight.
Duet Other Creators In TikTok
Another way to get fast exposure in TikTok is by dueting other creators' videos in your niche. You can tap another creator's video in TikTok and duet with your own voiceover or reaction that will get you exposure from your followers as well as from the followers of the creator with that you dueted with.
Create Short Demo Videos for TikTok
If you ever heard the story of Miss Excel, then you should be inspired to take advantage of the TikTok Algorithm. She literally built a successful business by teaching her audience how to use a boring tool like MS Excel by making it fun and easy.
You don't have to be super creative to do what she did. Create engaging product demos, make it fun and post them regularly with related hashtags and you might get a few hit videos that will make your business go viral.
Create Polls and Survey
TikTok came up with a new feature where you can add a poll or survey on your videos. If you can creatively make short videos where your audience can engage through poll/survey you will build more engaged followers.
The more engaged your followers get the more exposure you will get on the platform.
Share Your Videos On TikTok Stories
TikTok recently came up with their TikTok stories another way you can literally get free views and show your product and services to a new audience. Make sure you use hashtags effectively to maximize your reach.
Go Live On TikTok
TikTok rewards accounts that go live on their platform. When you go live you can reach a vast majority of your own followers and other accounts who aren't following you yet but might be interested in your product and service.
You can do live product demos or Q&A during the live to engage with your audience to build brand awareness. This is a little-known marketing idea that's still new to many so if you are looking to reach a new younger audience give TikTok Live a shot.
Reply to Your Audiences Question Via Short Video
Another way to show support to your audience in TikTok is by replying to their question on a short video format. It will show your audience that you care about them and they will trust your brand more than your competition.
Create Pins for Your Product
If Pinterest is one of the biggest social media where the consumer make their buying decision. Pinterest is mainly built for small businesses to share their product ideas so that customers can make buying decisions instantly and save an idea for the future.
If you have a product and service then create image-based pins and share them regularly in Pinterest.
Create Content About Your Product
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't dead and the google search is on the rise year over year. So if you have a product or service write a few pieces of content every month to get free traffic to your website from google. If you do it consistently over a period of time you will be able to build long-term authority on google eye and get a lot of free traffic.
Create Videos for Your Pinterest Account
Pinterest also entered the video marketing space by allowing the business account to crate and share videos on their platform. All you need to do is convert your personal account to a business account with a few clicks and share sharing video pins.
Create simple product demos and share them frequently on Pinterest. Don't forget to include related hashtags on your pins.
Start A Medium Blog
Another free marketing idea for your small business is creating a free blogging site on Medium. Medium is the biggest blogging site for creators who loves to write, but you can totally crush it with Medium by writing content based on your expertise to become an authority in your field.
Instead of your using your marketing efforts on creating and building a website from scratch you can harness the built-in power that medium built over the years and start creating content instantly.
Write Guest Posts and Guest Blogging
Collaborate with other experts within your niche to have them contribute a guest posting to your blog. If you build the relationship and put in the work upfront you will get collaborators within your niche who will happily guest blog on your blog.
Vice versa you can also do guest blogging for big players within your niche. If you stay consistent enough you will be able to get a few niche blog who is willing to work with you where both you and the other blog could be benefitted.
Start A Podcast
If you're looking for other marketing ideas to grow your small business, consider starting a podcast. Podcasting is a great way to share your expertise with the world and reach a new audience.
It's also a great way to build relationships with other experts in your field. If you can get other experts on your show, you'll not only grow your audience, but you'll also gain some valuable connections.
Be A Podcast Guest
Another way to reach a wider audience for your business is by being a guest in other creators' podcasts. You can reach out to small podcast creators first because it will be easy to get in. Focus on giving genuine value through the podcast to build authority and drive them to your social media channel for future monetization.
Bottom Line
There are a lot of creative free and paid marketing ideas for small businesses to consider in order to increase their product sales. We have provided 29 examples that can help get you started, but it's important to remember that not all of these strategies will work for every business.
It's important to think about your customer base, what type of products or services you offer, and what kind of budget you have to work with before choosing which marketing ideas to implement. With a little creativity and effort, you can find the perfect marketing strategy for your small business.
