DIY Marketing Month: Time for Small Businesses To Break Down Walls!
June is do-it-yourself (DIY) marketing month, so let me toss an idea out to you:
How about putting on your classiest office attire – suits for guys, dresses for gals – printing out some flyers for your business, attaching the flyers to your clothes and then go running in a local race.
Make the race a marathon and not only will you be promoting your small business, you’ll be getting yourself in fantastic shape!
Sound crazy? Well, a guy in East Northport, New York is pretty much doing just that, except he’s selling out the ad space on his clothing. The crazy idea got him a major write-up in Runner’s World, plus he’s making some extra money through the ad sales.
A much more common variation of this is to outfit your car with branding that promotes your small business. At the high end, you have car wrappers and at the low end you have magnetic signs. Turning your car into a rolling advertisement for your small business can be very cost effective.
According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, one vehicle wrap can generate as many as 30,000 to 70,000 impressions a day. Of course that is highly dependent on how much driving is done and the roads traveled. In any case, when compared to the cost of impressions generated through other advertising media, wrapping your car has the lowest cost.
I’m tossing this idea out there because as a small business owner you need to leverage the areas where you have a potential advantage over – or equality with – big businesses. Thinking a little “outside the box” is one of those areas. Big business likes more conservative marketing plays.
Social media is truly the great equalizer between big and small business. You can devise DIY social media campaigns that resonate with your prospects just as easily as any major corporation.
In 2014 Constant Contact sponsored the Small Business Online Marketing Contest hosted by the City of Chicago Treasurer’s Office.
The winning entry was designed to boost Nut Health’s followers and likes on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. People could win a $100 Whole Foods gift card if they “liked” the Facebook page and pledged to add 1.5 ounces of nuts to their diets. Nut Health boosted its Facebook likes for 129 to 2,433 and generated 729,000 impressions with 6,400 interactions by 5,700 unique users.
The women’s clothing boutique, Milk Handmade, moved inventory, rewarded its best customers and booked $1,000 in sales with a “Secret Sale” that allowed customers to take half off everything in the sales rack. The offer only went out to its email list and it used the simple subject line, “Our Little Secret.” It got a 43 percent open rate and 10 percent click-through rate.
These are just a few of the kinds of ideas small businesses can try during DIY marketing month. I would only add one cautionary note: Don’t let June be the only month when you work hard to come up with creative DIY marketing ideas!
Image: The Model Mill (Reeve 062828), ©2006 National Museum of Health and Medicine, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.