Forming partnerships with other brands has been a favourite marketing method of many who have gone before us. An ideal partner will share your target audience but will not be in competition with you. A good example would be a health club and sports clothes.
You can grow these relationships by, for example, creating joint literature – allow the health club a page advertorial in your monthly brochure and vice versa, exploit it as much as you can.
Get Social
No, not social media again. Actually get out there, meet your peers, meet your customers and go to talks and lectures by those in your field. Continue to learn. While attending events where you may meet potential customers, take your time to talk to them, find out what they know about your brand and what they think of it, they can be as useful to you as your product can be for them.
Although, don’t just attend any old event. They can be expensive, after hours and at times – tedious. Attend networking events for your local area, the Institute of Directors or Chamber of Commerce is a good place to start. If there aren’t any networking groups in your area, create one.
PR
If you are taking control of PR yourselves, then start by creating some case studies. Start with satisfied customers and their stories; include a good quality photograph (journalists and editors love photos!) Get on the telephone to trade magazines as well as business magazines to see if they would be interested in featuring your case studies. Get in touch with your local business magazines and business pages of your local paper, speak to them and see if they have any features coming up that you may be able to comment on or provide a quote for. The more people read your name and your companies name the more likely they are to visit your website and buy from you.
See if you can offer your expertise to a local Uni or college. Their PR teams would then deal with the PR! Not only will you be helping young talent but you will be putting your brand name out there, with both potential employees and customers.
Seminars
Promoting them, sponsoring them, attending them, speaking at them; anything to do with high profile seminars in your field – you should be there. Getting to know your peers and customers on a personal level will provide great word of mouth marketing for your organisation. Industry seminars can often be very insightful. With high profile speakers (this could be you!) attendees can learn from each other, share skills and often help each other out from a business perspective.
Further to speaking at seminars, why not host an online webinar? If you have an exciting product launch or an exciting announcement to make why not do so through a webinar, this is a low cost option and carbon friendly as nobody need travel anywhere. You could look into hosting regular webinars around a series of topics, making a name for yourself as an expert in your field. Webinars also involve those taking part to visit your website and provide contact details – pop those onto your email marketing database!!
As we've said before, having a website is great, but not unless it gets visitors, and at Whype we're dedicated to not only giving you a website that works, but also helping you (with articles like this) to make the most of free and low cost ways to promote it.
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