Effective Small Business Public Relations (PR) and Traditional Marketing Methods

No doubt Public Relations (PR) still has a huge role to play in modern small business marketing even though it has been around for quite a while. Marketers still have confidence in it to get their marketing messages out here. This is in addition to the fact that consumers trust earned media more than brands, social media posts, or even influencers. If PR is handled by trained professionals, it manages to help build consumer trust fairly quickly. Below are the commonest methods these professionals use to get the best results.

Tested Public Relations (PR) Marketing Methods

What gets the best results is what marketers need in their marketing strategy. If you want to score your business with some positive earned media coverage, get cracking with:
 
PR Stunts

If you are a marketer, and you have no publicity budget restrictions, you can always pull off a PR stunt. It is one great way to organize a spectacular fun fare that attracts a lot of people from the local communities. If the event is well staged and massively attended, it helps to build brand awareness by generating free press.

Press Releases

Well timed press releases are also great marketing methods. The essence of press releases is to get a good story/message out through an appropriate medium to get wide readership. You can get messages out from your social media handles or by giving a good story to a journalist who can quickly and easily turn it into a career-building piece of content for both of you. You can always get good press releases if you focus on pitching only the most important stories that will attract good readership. If you do this consistently, you can build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your readers and even news outlets.

Community and Industry Events

It is fantastic PR marketing if you can get your business involved in events in your local community. Same goes for your niche industry. You can consider sponsoring local a derby involving Soccer or basketball or baseball games. Sponsoring other sports meets particularly for children and young adults is also a great idea. Contributing employees’ hours to volunteer work in sanitation and cleaning, health and fitness walk in your community are great PR for your business. These volunteer service and sponsorship events do not only make your community a better place to live in, they also help to build your brand and expose your business to new customers.

Tested Traditional Marketing Methods

Traditional marketing may sound old school when compared to digital marketing, but it is still a very effective marketing strategy particularly in certain industries and geographical locations. Marketers do get appreciable returns in traditional marketing even though it is quite difficult to really track the ROI accurately. That is not to say it is ineffective though.

Below are marketers’ favorite traditional marketing methods that can be of use to you in your small business marketing.

Direct Mail

If you are a smart marketer, you can use direct mail to stand out even in this digital age. You can mail brochures, promos, how-to messages and other forms of messages through direct mail to consumers in their homes. If your messages are great and well timed, you can be lucky to break through the clutter and catch the attention of the consumers.

Billboard Ads

Yeah, everyone still finds billboards on the highways as they drive along. The attention catching giant constructions work to catch the attention of everyone passing by. Billboards may be quite expensive to erect over a wide area but you can cut your budget and concentrate on the ones you can afford only in a selected local community, making sure you have the right permits though. For effectiveness, you need to be very strategic in erecting billboards. It is hugely impactful if you erect a billboard at the main entrance to your business premises particularly if you are into factory work or manufacturing.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing can be a very effective marketing strategy if done right. Getting the correct telephone numbers and knowing when to make that all important call is crucial if you don’t want to suffer excessive rejections. If not done right, telemarking can make you to waste time and money making annoying calls and even to unlikely buyers. If done right, it can be quite effective to turn many prospective buyers into customers.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing can be quite effective to get new customers. Unlike telemarketing, SMS marketing does not rudely intrude into the privacy of prospective buyers. Recipients can always open their SMS messages at their own convenience. This is why SMS messages have open rates as high as 98%.

Radio and TV Ads

Radio and TV are still effective marketing channels for ads. For most marketers, the problem is not that of effectiveness but excessive costs to advertise on Radio and TV. Many homesteads do afford to have Radios and TVs and people habitually rely on them for their main sources of information. Depending on the products you are marketing and your target market, Radio and TV can easily and quickly get your message out if you can afford the cost. You can however cut down on costs and still get good results if you purchase ads on other audio platforms, such as podcasts or Spotify.

Newspaper Ads

Newspaper ads are an effective marketing strategy particularly in a society with high literacy rate. That is where you have the type of audience that regularly picks up a physical newspaper. Inside newspapers, an insert, digital ad, or classified ad are great ways to send out a marketing message that gets results. However, you must always endeavor to choose your outlets carefully, negotiate rates, and spend time creating engaging content if you want the best results. Settling for mediocre visual design or lackluster copy won’t get you impressive results in newspaper advertising.

Tested Content and Video Marketing Techniques for Small Business

In digital marketing parlance, content is king. Good content is indispensable to effective marketing in the digital world; the reason content is everywhere out there. Marketers need content in their websites, social media handles, for their email marketing campaigns, brand design and content marketing strategies. However, an effective content must not only have good quality, it must also have context. Before creating content therefore, you must keep your audience, the platform you are using, your brand, and the customer experience in mind. That is about the best way to create quality content that has context and gets the best marketing results.

Content Marketing Techniques

With the right content marketing techniques, you can plan on pleasing your audience consistently with high-quality content, by way of the following content marketing methods.

Blogging

Marketers usually create content and market it through their blogs. That is blogging which is about the most popular content marketing technique out there. Through your published blog content, you can start generating recurring traffic to your own site. That is the kind of content that serves multiple purposes for your business, particularly for:

Driving organic traffic
Troubleshooting for customers
Building your brand authority as a thought leader
Serving content for paid traffic, and
Providing helpful content for users

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is about the best way to expose your brand to new audiences by guest posting on other blogs. This you can do through a mutual blog-post exchange with other brands, pay to contribute, or even by just providing valuable free content to another website. What you choose to do depends on the relationship you establish with other businesses/brands/popular blogs. It is all about better exposure for your content. If your guest-blog host is hugely popular with a large following, that’s great.  It gives you a great platform to better spread awareness for your brand. The key to guest blogging is to provide plenty of value first then plug is your business later.

Podcasting

When compared to other forms of content marketing techniques, podcasting appears to be a relatively new content marketing strategy. As an effective marketing technique, it does not appear to be too saturated yet. You can package influencer interviews, specialized how-to expertise and suchlike great info for your audience in podcasting form. If you are packaging influencer interviews, getting your first big interview is usually the hardest part. If you manage to get a good one, the snowball effect can keep your momentum going for quite a while.

Gift Content

Depending on the product you are marketing, you can create some free content as giveaways on your website. Your website visitors can have these gifts in exchange for their email addresses which you need to build your email list. Such free content could be in form of an eBook, access to a guide, a checklist, or even some discount coupon. Just make sure to offer some valuable things to your audience in exchange for their email addresses. On your website, you can then create landing pages and signup forms to promote your content. Next move is to drive traffic to these pages. If the pages are well optimized, they will help your conversions to new leads and even sales.

Video Marketing Techniques

Smart marketers can always find affordable ways to incorporate video into their small business marketing strategy. This is because of the high effectiveness of video marketing. If your marketing videos are well shot, they could make all the difference between your customers choosing your product or your competitor’s. Most times, such videos might really be all a buyer needs to buy your products outright or sign up for a free trial.

Here are a few highly effective and budget-friendly ways you can use videos in your small business marketing program:

Product Videos

Marketers use product videos to explain more about the product/service they are marketing. Through these videos, marketers can clearly outline how the product works, why it’s helpful, use cases, and even its salient and useful features. These videos tend to act like premieres to exciting movies. If well shot, videos should be exciting enough to grab viewers’ attention and make them to click a link to learn more about the product/service, make a purchase, or sign-up for a full-fledged demo.

How-to Videos

Marketers create how-to videos to practically teach their customers how the product/service they are marketing works. Whatever the product is, most buyers always want to know how they can use it to do for them what the marketer says the product can do. A proper video demonstration of how a product works can actually entice buyers to buy the product. Marketers like to create such videos to show customers how to for instance assemble a piece of equipment they are selling. That practical demonstration is usually more helpful to buyers than any Manual of Operation no matter how beautifully written.

Reviews and Testimonials

Most online shoppers usually trust customer reviews. A very high percentage of online shoppers read online reviews before making their buy decisions. Reviews are more in text form while Testimonials if in video form tend to get better attention. With Testimonials, you get to control the narrative and use them on any platforms or channels you prefer. You may choose to collect just short one-liner testimonials for your website/blog. Long case-study testimonials are best suited for your YouTube and social media channels.

Video Advertising

You can market your business with video on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Some of these videos could be short in-stream skippable video ads, non-skippable bumper ads, overlay ads, or display ads. For best results, you can experiment with different ads formats to see which resonate most with your audience. You can then choose the ones that get you the best returns on your marketing investment then build your marketing strategy around them.