I want to share some thoughts about a question I recently received from a store owner regarding establishing an online marketing presence. Specifically, the question was about the transition from a brick-and-mortar store to an online business. This person asked me: “What do I do if I don’t have enough money to market myself online?” The honest truth is in business, whether it’s online or in person, if you’re going to market yourself (and your services and your products) to the outside world, you’re going to have to do one of two things (or some combination of these two, depending upon your strategy). You are going to have to spend money or you are going to have to spend time.
When it comes to spending money, this is often on advertising or for specialized help such as an agency or people to do publishing for you. A great method that we use in our agency for sewing machine retailers is lead generation ads on Facebook. This can also be in the form of your employees or your team as well -- anyone you are paying to publish, or advertise, or whatever means you are using to create awareness and put your offers and brand before potential customers. One strategy I used to use in sewing machine retail was making it part of our sewing teacher’s job to regularly post live feeds and cool content on our Facebook page.
If you don’t have the money to hire an agency, you