Every business, small or big, have to learn how to unleash an effective marketing campaign to bring their quality products or services to the right market, retain existing customers, increase their sales and profitability, and grow their business. In the Philippines, small enterprises are facing a lot of challenges, and one of these challenges is how to implement inexpensive yet effective marketing strategies and tactics to make their business more competitive. If you own a small business in the Philippines and you want to achieve optimal success, here are 15 quick marketing tips for small businesses in our country.
1. Invest time and passion in your products. If you don’t have a big marketing budget in terms of money, invest your time and dedication to create high-quality products that will satisfy or wow your customers. Remember that product is the first element of marketing. You should not promote a certain product that will only disappoint your consumers.
2. Pay attention to your customers. To ensure that you can produce the right products or solutions, research your target market first. Pay attention to what they really need. Identify their problems to create solutions that could help them solve those problems. Remember that you should not just do business and sell products to make profit, but you should also do it to provide solutions to people’s problems.
3. Have a website and a blog. Get big on the Internet. No matter how small your business is, you can have a professionally designed company website to have a big presence online. You can also create a blog to regularly publish rich content (i.e., articles, images and videos) that will attract more visitors to your site and more customers to your business. A website and a blog can be created simultaneously using free CMS (content management system) software like WordPress. You just need to invest on domain name, web hosting, and if you don’t know how to create a website on your own, you could hire a website developer.
4. Create viral content. Content marketing is one of the most important strategies in Internet marketing. You can try publishing highly useful, informational and interesting articles on your blog. You can also create viral videos and upload them on YouTube. Take note that you don’t need to spend a large amount of money in attempting to create a viral marketing campaign online, but you need to use your creativity and imagination to successfully get the attention of your target audience.
5. SEO your business. Optimize your website and blog for the search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your web pages rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs), resulting to more website traffic and potentially more customers. SEO involves improving your website content and structure (on-page optimization) and link building (off-page optimization).
6. Get visible on social media. A website and a blog could initially cost around Php10,000 to Php20,000. But if you really don’t want to spend any dime, you can create a Facebook Page, Twitter Profile, YouTube Channel and other top social networking pages for free to establish your presence online through social media. However, I still recommend a website and a blog for your small business to have a more powerful presence online.
7. Be easily accessible offline. A good location or a place where customers can access your business is an important element of a successful marketing. Hence, make sure that your prospective and current customers can always reach your business’ physical location. Remember that it is during personal meeting that relationship actually builds up. Hence, don’t rely too much on Internet communication, but connect personally as possible.
8. Set the right prices. Price is also one of the main elements of marketing. Thus, if you want to persuade people to buy your products, make sure that your prices are set according to their level. Don’t just target your customers according to your products, but also according to your price. Set prices that are competitive. Just remember to follow the DTI’s regulations on pricing of commodities in the Philippines so that you will always do business according to the government’s rules.
9. Give discounts or freebies. If you can’t give something that you don’t have, then you might give something you already have – a portion of your product (freebies) or price (discounts). People always love free stuff or something that could save their cash. Just make sure you’ll still provide the same quality of products whether they are discounted, free sample or regularly priced.
10. Join groups or associations. By joining groups, associations or communities of people whom you share the same interests, you can expand your network and open more opportunities for meeting new people, get customer leads, and grow your business. Often, you will learn new ideas on how to make your business more successful from others in your group or association.
11. Provide free extra services. Don’t just end your obligation to your customers after you have made a sale or after they have paid you the money for their purchase. If you really want to retain your existing customers and make them loyal, make sure that they will not only be satisfied on the products they anticipate but also on the add-on free services that they don’t expect, such as free delivery or free installation of a certain product.
12. Improve your customer service. Make sure that your customers will have a great experience when they do business with you. There are many ways to improve your customer service. A simple yet warm greeting to your customers when they enter your office and a sincere thank you when they leave your premises are already some of the simple practices you can do to make a big impact on your customers.
13. Let them know you better. If you want to be loved by your customers, let them know you better. Let your customers know deeper things about your business, such as your core values, principles, vision and mission. You could include them on your company profile in your website. You can also display them conspicuously in your business premises.
14. Help your community. If you want to show to your customers that you care for them, you should show to them that you also care for the planet that they live in. Marketing is not only about your business, but it can also be about your society or about even the world. Thus, have a great cause why you are doing business.
15. Create a marketing plan and execute it. Finally, after reading all the tips above, you may have learned some marketing strategies and tactics that you could do to market your business. Perhaps you already have your own original marketing ideas that you could also do together with the above tips. Now, my final tip for you is to execute them with a plan. Design a strategic marketing plan to make your marketing more achievable, efficient and trackable. And of course, don’t forget to be consistent with your plan when you execute them.
Good luck and have best results in your marketing campaign!
Victorino Q. Abrugar is a marketing strategist and business consultant from Tacloban City, Philippines. Vic has been in the online marketing industry for more than 7 years, practicing problogging, web development, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and consulting.
This is an easy “sell”, compared with direct marketing campaigns, television advertisements and other sophisticated and expensive approaches to attract new customers.
Thank you Jody for visiting our blog!