How are small businesses marketing their way to success?

What year the business started:
2007

Why you started the business:
I always found my primary career path (as a web developer/programmer) lacked design & creativity and was looking for a fun, creative outlet. I loved photography, working with computers, technology and gadgets so after following the trends of photo gifts and personalised gifts in the US marketplace for some time decided to start up selling similar products here in Australia to consumers.

I also envisaged one day being able to work from home once I had young children and since this business is primarily online, enables me to work towards that goal too.

What marketing activities worked and what didn’t:
I have found social media networks (such as facebook & twitter) have work very well for our business. Since we are still quite a small fish in the sea of competition in our industry I am always looking for ways to make our company stand out from the crowd. We have watch trends and marketing tactics other small and large businesses have used on such sites and tweaked them to work for us too. Social media network have enabled us to appear much bigger than we are with many fans and followers. Recently we ran a Mothers Day Photo Competition on facebook and more than doubled our fan base from just one single cleverly organised competition.

We have found that newspaper and magazine advertising hasn’t work as well for us as expected. Our budget is still quite low and therefore we tend only to purchase small advertising space which means we usually don’t get much notice by those browsing through the publications. For brand awareness it is definately helpful, but doesn’t really seem to drive much new traffic to our business. Perhaps if we had a larger budget and were able to purchase entire page ads, then we could more easily lure customers.

Nadia Kerr
www.DigiGifts.com.au

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