{"id":9952,"date":"2017-02-23T22:29:44","date_gmt":"2017-02-23T22:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/alternative-ways-to-promote-your-business\/"},"modified":"2017-02-23T22:29:44","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T22:29:44","slug":"alternative-ways-to-promote-your-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/alternative-ways-to-promote-your-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Alternative ways to promote your business"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span id='pk-id' \/><\/p>\n<p>All small business owners face tricky marketing challenges.&nbsp;While social media and email campaigns are&nbsp;common sense at this point, that doesn&#039;t mean this is where you draw the line when promoting your new business. Here are a few out-of-the-box ideas that will help get the word out:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hold contests<\/strong><br \/>\nLeveraging free marketing tools like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are effective&nbsp;options for promoting your brand.&nbsp;But there&#039;s&nbsp;only so much you can do on your own, especially if you don&#039;t want to invest in sponsored advertisements. Focus on&nbsp;encouraging your followers to spread the word. A great way&nbsp;to promote your business&nbsp;is to hold contests that require followers&nbsp;to share a post to enter.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>To do this, post a photo on Instagram of a new product and tell your followers to share&nbsp;the photo and tag your company in the caption. Each person who shares this&nbsp;image&nbsp;exposes your brand to his or her&nbsp;whole following. This is an especially useful tool for businesses involved in niche markets with a large social media presence, like wedding planning, artisan food or drinks, or cosmetics.<\/p>\n<div class=\"inlineImageWrapper\" style=\"padding-right: 3px;float: left;margin: 10px !important;width: 100% !important;height: auto !important\">\n<figure style=\"margin: 0px!important;font-style: italic!important\">\n\t<img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Blogging is a great way to become an informative voice in your industry.\" class=\"inlineImage\" height=\"auto\" id=\"14072637\" src=\"https:\/\/pictures.brafton.com\/x_0_0_0_14072637_800.jpg\" width=\"100%\" \/>Blogging is a great way&nbsp;to become an informative voice in your industry.<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>Start a blog<\/strong><br \/>\nBlogging on your company&#039;s website&nbsp;is another useful way to market your business, especially if you&#039;re able to incorporate your company&#039;s goods and services into topics that are&nbsp;shareable to the masses. Become an informative voice in your industry, and&nbsp;you&#039;ll drive traffic to your company&#039;s website, even if people aren&#039;t looking to purchase your goods or services immediately. This&nbsp;gives potential customers the impression that you&#039;re a trustworthy entity to do business with in the future.<\/p>\n<p>If your content can loosely tie back to your product without seeming too sales-y, you&#039;ll also gain more publicity each time a reader shares your blog posts with members of his or her online network, especially if you utilize search engine optimization.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Use your business cards<\/strong><br \/>\n&nbsp;Business cards may seem like an old-school method of marketing, but&nbsp;there are plenty of ways to bring&nbsp;them&nbsp;into the 21st century. Of course, you can bring business cards to other storefronts in your neighborhood for promotion. However, &nbsp;the best way to get people to pay attention is to give your card another purpose. Entrepreneur suggests using your business card as an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.entrepreneur.com\/article\/226721\" target=\"_blank\">event ticket, note card or sticker<\/a>. Add an even bigger impact by having your business card&#039;s function coincide with what your company does. Get creative in a variety of ways. For example, if you run a publishing house or bookstore, print your business information on a bookmark. If you own a hair salon, a comb with&nbsp;your contact information would be fun and functional. Do you make custom artisan candles? Make your business card a book of matches!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While social media and email campaigns are considered common sense at this point, that doesn&#8217;t mean this is where you should draw the line when\u00a0looking to promote your new business.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":9953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1448],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.123print.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}