Ideas for cost effective marketing to beat the credit crunch

[in2town]

Times are hard with the credit crunch so I would like for everyone to come together and share with people ideas on cost effective marketing.

I will start off with the following:

1. Leaflet distribution. If you would like to gain exposure by doing a leaflet drop, save yourself some money and share the cost with another business in your area. Find someone who would be interested in sharing the cost with you and who would like to gain exposure the cost effective way. Ok leaflets are old hat but they still do work and if you can gain customers and exposure for half the cost then it is a great way to save money and to gain new customers.

If you have any colleges in your area, then speak to them first to see how much the printing will cost you. You will find a lot of these places will do it a lot cheaper than the high street printers, and also some hospitals provide a printing service.

2. Gain radio exposure. Listen to your local radio station, think about your business and think what people may find interesting about your business. Maybe you have decided to go all green, or maybe your are supporting a local school. It can be anything, but when you have thought about a few things that people maybe interested in your business, go and ask some friends to see if they would find it interesting.

[wecando.biz]

We hear lots of great things from our members on the new contacts they are making on our lead and referral networking site. it costs nothing other than as much time as you are prepared to give it, which need be no more than 5 minutes to get your account set up.

If you already have a strong database of prospects and customers then e-mail marketing using things like VerticalResponse can be a great way of driving traffic to pages on your site.

IH

[erikko]

for me the internet is the cost-effective way of marketing

[Bill Deakin]

I've been getting great response recently from blogging and article marketing. I've tried both in the past but never consistenly and in a structured way. Now that I have planned my activity and started to implement it properly I'm getting good results.

Also look for free press coverage. Advertising in the press can be expensive, but create a good story around your business and you could get free editorial. A few months ago I put together a press release for my father's business. They moved to a new purpose built unit in the same town a couple of years ago so we used the angle of 'business expands but decides to stay local', beefed it up with some history, interesting facts and figures and a couple of photos and we had a quarter page article in the local paper - an advert that size would have cost us over £500 and it only took a couple of hours!