Marketing Ideas

Marketing ideas can help promote your small business effectively to your customers. Here are some free business marketing ideas you can use on your business at no cost to your organisation except for your own time.

Just remember that most marketing people understand is all about promotion - so the items below are promoting your products to new and existing customers. The marketing cycle begins by understanding your customer needs and wants and how to develop a product or service to satisfy those needs. But anyhow, here are some promotional ideas you can use to get more profitable customers....

Sell Redeemable Tokens

Selling redeemable tokens is a great idea because it's not always the end user who will purchase the product. Tokens can be given to others as presents and redeemed against your products at a later date. There are many benefits with the token model. The biggest is that many people will not actually be used (as long as you have an expiry date) so you effectively get free cash for your organisation. Even if the tokens are used you get the cash upfront which you can bank and earn interest. Additionally, people will use their token as part payment so you'll earn extra money when the actual purchase is made.

Up-sell and Cross-sell Your Products

How often do you sell one product to one customer and then never see that customer again? A lot of businesses operate in this manner where they spend time and money attracting the prospect and enticing them to purchase and then go onto the next customer for their sale. If a customer is purchasing from you try asking them if there is something else they may like; as McDonalds say "would you like fries with that" - that is their minimum upsell. If you want to see how to upsell go into McDonalds and ask for a burger and see what sale patter they go through. You can do this with your own sales machine. At the purchasing stage whilst your customer has their credit card out attempt to sell them something else. Even after the sale get their details and continue to communicate with them. After all they have purchased from you and know (and hopefully trust your company already so are more likely to purchase from you in the future).

Hold a competition

Everyone likes the chance to win something so hold a competition for your customers. For example, free Amazon vouchers draw for 10 lucky customers this month - or win the price of your purchase. This should entice more people to buy and the cost of the competition for your business is minimal if you get many more customers through your door buying.

Member get member

Member get member sales promotions are one of the oldest and perhaps more successful marketing promotions you can undertake. Certainly Sky TV and American Express have been using this tactic for years. It works like this. Your business contacts all of your customers and if one of your customers introduces one of their friends to your business and they buy something (that you decide) then both the referring customer and new customer get some form of bonus. Most bonuses are in the form of a discount vouchers either with your business or another high street business. You can buy high street vouchers at a discount as many are not used (see the first item above).

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