Low cost advertising for new business to boost income!

natrab

Hey Guys

Do any of you have any suggestions on how to advertise a new business with minimal outlay??

I have just set up my own events company (currently building my website) and wondered if there is anywhere i can advertise for free or really low cost?

I am going to be doing this alongside my full time job to help clear up my debt and start saving!!! woo hoo

Thanks
NatRab

SkintKlint

Do you have any web design experience?

If not, you could do more harm than good.

The cheapest ways to promote, rather than advertise your business are to know your customer (I'm asuming yours will be small to medium businesses?), then:

Get on the phone to them, find out what they want and provide it;

Get out and network - Business clubs, chambers of commerce - They all organise business networking events.

Trade shows - Don't book a stand (they're usually pretty expensive), but turn up with plenty of business cards!

Join a Golf Club - sounds corny, but as your B2B (I'm assuming) it could work surprisingly well - I'm yet to meet a director / chairman who doesn't play!

aztec21

You could try Google Adwords PPC once the site is up and running.

cazi

Advertise on Gumtree and netmums, its free :j

richt71

aztec21 wrote: »

You could try Google Adwords PPC once the site is up and running.

Adwords only works if you set the ad out right with keywords and capitals otherwise you'll be charged a high cost per click.
Start a blog and link to your website. Buy a keyword rich domain related to your business. Submit articles online about your business.
All these hings will help get long term targeted visitors to your website but it might take a few months to kick in.

richt71

Another idea although not free is to join your loacl chamber of commerce. They usually circulate your business details to other members upon joining. You could also give a short speak about exciting events you've been to and how it helped business. If you give a give speak you can get a stampede of business owners wanting to chat to you - take plenty of business cards ready to hand out.

danteCARAX

I think your perhaps approaching the process of advertising the wrong way; you could promote yourself in countless ways cheaply, but these mediums could be of little relevance to reaching your target market, and thus prove accumulatively an ineffective use of both cash and time resources (the latter of which is of notable significance given you allready have a full-time job.)

Don't just go out with all guns blazing, throwing your firms name around here and there for as little money as possible, but instead take a step back, and think about where your proposed consumers are likely to be found, and how best to communicate with them (I don't just mean in person.)

Creating any old advertisement is easy, but creating an effective one is not.

Think about how you want your company to be perceived. As SkintKlint said by doing it for as little expenditure as possible you might do harm than good. For instance would advertising somewhere freely compromise the perceived value of the service you offer - and in actual fact put people off?

You mention your building a website. Whilst a step in the right direction; do you understand IM? realise that as an events company your going to have to make it look pretty slick, and as your just starting out creating a significant amount of content might prove tricky (ie. testimonials, galleries), and then there is the issues of SEO so that people organically find the site - given there are 80 million search results for ''events company'' you will have to initially work pretty hard to get listed anywhere near the top page ranks. etc.

I'd seriously reccommend checking out warrior forums for considerable information on making your webpage work. And unless your comfortable with IM I'd advise against Adwords or any other PPCs, at least untill your at grips with it all.

As your starting out would also be worth contacting business link - they'll offer you mentoring sessions for free (to begin with anyway) on how to draw up an effective campaign, and are also likely to have lots of contacts whom might be of interest to you.


Apolagies if this sounds patronising in any shape or form, I don't mean it too, but am just concerned from your post that perhaps it still needs some thinking through.

It's tempting to dive in head-first sometimes, particularly when buzzing with excitement about a new venture, but if you pause and plan it's more often than not more likely to work out better in the long run.

All the best.

moo2moo

Do a freebie! Promote an event in your local community, show a struggling playgroup or a school or a scout group what can be achieved with positive promotions. Whatever events you do .... music? bingo? murder mystery dinners? corporate? adapt it to suit them. The kids all have parents. The parents mostly work. A lot of them run small businesses, some of them run much bigger ones. Show that you can do the job and do it very well. You'll get more work word of mouth from something like that than you will with a yellow pages ad. It will also give you the opportunity to iron out any teething problems.

17Dave

I would like to echo moo2moo's post - don't just look for free advertising do some freebies yourself. It might be helping a charity with an event or giving a talk to a local group about events management (did you see the start of Calendar Girls - some talk topics are yawn making in the extreme!!).

Whilst you do need to target your paid for marketing carefully I always advise people (and I practice what I preach) to tell everyone, you never know who knows someone who need a good events management compnay and never ever be without a business card - give them to everyone too - put them in letters you write (or a brochure) or bills you pay to local companies (not BT or Powergen obviously).

So in summary - don't hide your light - shout it out - I'm open for business NOW.

angelinna

Hi natrab,

To advertise my website I used email advertising.

I googled 'opt-in email advertising' and tested each week the companies I found there (used the first ones listed on that page) and got a lot of traffic, but the sales did not increase too much.
Acceptable results I got for taketheinternetback.com where I paid 1000 emails for $15 and got not only traffic, but also some sales. I got about 470 visits from them in about one week.

I'm quite happy with the results and I'm seriously thinking about using them again for my future emails campaigns.