You’ve got a great idea for a business, you’ve got everything in place including your logo and now you need to find your customers.

You could offer the best products or services in the world, but that alone won’t help if your potential customers can’t find you – so you need a great marketing strategy to match.

Here’s our list of 11 marketing tips that are sure to increase your visibility and help bring lots of new customers your way.

1. Branding – establish a clear identity

In order to communicate what your company is, does and stands for, you need to have a clear identity. Once you know what your company represents, you need a suitable name, a logo, colors and imagery that convey this to your customers.

There are several different options for how to do this, including hiring a freelancer or collaborating with an established agency. This kind of work can be costly, but it’s money well spent. Think about how huge companies like Starbucks or McDonald’s are defined by their brands, logos and colors.

When you have your logo, make sure you put it on everything, advertising, business cards, envelopes, email signature and so on to build brand awareness and visibility. You should also go beyond just “rubber stamping” your logo everywhere – your brand should be memorable even if the logo is removed.

2. Know your business and know your customers

A common misconception is that there is some kind of one-size-fits-all marketing strategy that you can follow and expect great results, whatever your business. This is simply not true since all businesses are different, and all have different requirements.

Before you choose which elements to integrate into your overall marketing strategy, you need to think carefully about your target customers. What is their demographic? How old are they? Where do they live? What online services do they use? How do they look for your product?

Being clear about details such as these will allow you to develop a targeted and more effective overall strategy that focuses on the channels most likely to produce results for you.

3. Have a great website

If there’s one thing that will put people off your company, it’s having a poorly designed website. Think about it, you’ve done the hard part getting that click and bringing the customer to your site – and they find the site to be user-unfriendly, hard to navigate or not logically laid out.

This is such a simple error to avoid so don’t make this basic mistake.

4. Don’t forget email

Email has many advantages as a marketing channel. It is easy to do, easy to automate, allows instantaneous communication, costs very little and can reach a large number of potential customers with the highest open rates, especially if you segment your list as shown above.

Once you add somebody’s address to your mailing list, make sure you provide interesting, valuable and relevant content that people will actually open rather than deleting immediately or sending to the “spam” box – otherwise, you are just wasting your time.

The main idea is to get people to come back to your website at a later date when they are likely to buy your product. Email leads still have one of the highest conversion rates of all sources.

5. Sponsor a local sports team

With so much being done online nowadays, sometimes people forget the more traditional ways of gaining visibility. For local businesses, sponsoring a local sports team is still a great way to raise awareness of your company.

People love their local sports teams and having your logo emblazoned on the kit will make people associate your brand with the local area. They will be more likely to think of you when they need your product and will be more likely to come to you due to that local association.

6. Promote product awareness with free samples or demos

If you want to build awareness of your product, you need to let people try it. A great example of this is when Keurig wanted to move from making coffee machines for the office to producing machines designed for home use.

Despite the fact they had a fantastic product to sell, at the time a pod-based coffee machine was still a very novel idea, so they made an effort to demonstrate their Keurig Brewing System in stores and other high-visibility locations.

The strategy obviously paid off since the company has since gone on to dominate the US home brew coffee market and become a way of life.

7. Work the referrals

Use your existing customers to drum up more business: try to incentivize referrals to encourage your customers to bring in more.

It’s difficult to generalize here since this could take so many forms depending on what kind of business you run. However, if you offer rewards like free products, gifts , discounts or something else, your already satisfied customers will be happy to bring in more leads for you.

The other advantage of referrals is that if your customers are recommending you to their friends, their friends will automatically be more predisposed to trust you. For this reason, referral leads offer a much higher conversion rate than many other channels.

By Jacob Cass