Promoting Your Material on a Budget

Now, if you’re an artist or start-up business owner, you most likely know how it feels to go without, for the sake of your career, simply because you have that much passion for it. You may even be going through that phase right now, and you may feel like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to your career. Does this cycle sound familiar to you:

• I don’t have money because my music/business hasn’t taken off.
• My music/business hasn’t taken off because it’s not being promoted enough.
• It’s not being promoted enough because promotion takes money, and I don’t have money.
• (repeat steps 1-3 above)

This is probably one of the most frustrating phases that about every career builder has gone through. The good news about this cycle, is that promotiondoesn’t have to cost loads of money. Ironically enough, the cheapest/free forms of promotion work the best!

Now, as you know, different marketing tactics yield different results for each business, depending on the nature of the business, the execution of that marketing tactic, your target market (I will discuss what a target market is in a future post so be sure to follow us!), etc, but there are certain ground rules to marketing that go pretty much across the board. Here are a few to get you started:

• Free Samples: I briefly talked about the wonders of free samples in a previous marketing post about “Being Your Own Case Study”. Free samples almost always work for a few reasons. For one, the obvious, the customer doesn’t have to spend money to experience your brand, so having nothing to lose will levitate them toward what you are trying to sell. Secondly, free samples allow people to freely develop a personal relationship with your brand, and that’s important because barely anyone actually buys into something they’re not familiar with, no matter how well the brand is presented to them, which brings me to the third reason: Sometimes, people never realize they actually “need” or “want” something until they try it, and if what you’re trying to market actually fulfills a need or a desire that’s not being fulfilled by anyone else, you’re already in good business. For example, I never used facial exfoliators before, but the cashier presented me with a free sample of Garnier Balanced Daily Exfoliator. I went home and tried it, and my face was super soft, and I ended up going back and buying a whole bottle of it. I never realized that I “needed” that exfoliator until I tried the free sample…. (Cont’d)

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