Brand Recognition is all businesses want to achieve building its brands. Marketing is a major part of branding and good marketing strategy can really help you to push your brand forward. The problem faced by many small business owners is that marketing campaigns can be costly. If you employ only a handful of people, you simply don’t have enough money to spend on marketing but don’t worry we know how to create effective marketing campaigns for very little money and we are happy to share our ideas with you! Enjoy.

Before we tap into specifics there is one thing you should remember when planning your marketing activities – Good marketing should always be a part of your branding strategy. In other words, your marketing needs to be consistent with your brand. If you sell high quality products to serious clients don’t send cheesy leaflets, if your logo is blue and black, don’t produce green and yellow leaflets!

Brand Recognition’s key is Social media!

Before the social media revolution reaching to millions of people in an instant wasn’t possible. Fortunately, things have changed – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hundreds of other social media platforms are great marketing tools that you can use for free. Publishing engaging content, writing blogs, shooting videos and sharing pictures can help you stand out from the crowd. Some people might think that social media simply isn’t right for their business but that is not true.

If you run a restaurant a video of your chef singing Taylor Swift’s songs while cooking and your waiters dancing to it could go viral anytime helping you reach out to millions. The same goes for plumbers, barbers, takeaways, convince stores, online retailers and whatever else it is that you might be doing.
In the next few days we will publish a detailed guide on how to use social media as a small business so stay tuned!

Brand Recognition vs Online Marketing.

Online marketing is an affordable way to attract new customers and push your brand forward no matter if you work globally or locally. Tools like Google AdWords or Facebook adds can help you to reach your target audience for a relatively small cost. Depending on the type of your business you can use online listing platforms and business specific sites like Gumtree.

Email campaigns and competitions can also prove very useful. Using tools like MailChimp you can reach to your customers and tell them all about your new products or services. (Remember to get their permission before adding them to your mailing list).

Brand Recognition, Loyalty and customer referral programmes.

In one of our articles we talked about word-of-mouth being a powerful tool for small businesses. That is why you should do all you can to make it even more effective. Offering discounts for your loyal customers who refer their friends to your business doesn’t cost much and yet it works great. Your existing customers are the best marketers and showing that you appreciate their loyalty will not go unnoticed.

Giffgaff, a small mobile network operator in the UK illustrates the power of customer referral programmes. Every Giffgaff customer can get a £5 bonus for bringing a new customer on board. The result? In 2013 Giffgaff was the fastest growing network operator in the UK and by 2015 it became the third largest virtual (meaning it hasn’t got its own infrastructure) operator, only behind Virgin and Tesco. The most dedicated customers made £13,000 via the referral programmes. That sounds like a lot of money until you realise that it brought more than 2000 new customers to the company making it one of the most effective marketing campaigns

Be visible in your local community.

If your business is local, then be sure to engage with the local community. This will help you increase your recognition, promote your products and build your brand. It doesn’t cost a fortune to give away some freebies during a local event. You might consider organising an event yourself. For example, hiring a local is a great idea when you run a restaurant. Engaging with the community will help you to build your image of a trustworthy and a truly local business.

Traditional marketing still counts.

The fact, that we live in a digital age, doesn’t mean traditional marketing is dead. Banners and leaflets are still effective and not too expensive. Leaflets can be a particularly good idea when you want to increase customer awareness or share the news about your new products and services. It might be a good idea to combine leaflets with offers, like a 5% discount to customers who show the leaflet when purchasing the products.

Brand Recognition doesn’t have to be expensive to achieve and it is worth to hire professionals to do marketing for you. We hope that those few ideas will help you plan your next marketing campaign!