Small Business Marketing Strategies: 5 Ways To Step Up Your Game In This Recession

Any small business owner knows making money isn't what it was 5 or 10 years ago; the economy is putting a hurting on entrepreneurs. After 2000 hit, new business owners had it easy. There was a glut of money and no real need to market in order to run a successful business. While the ante has been upped, you can still rake in the money with good marketing. A successful overall strategy is unique to each specific business, but here are 5 small business market strategies to get your wheels turning:

1. Email Marketing

While I discourage the tendency for business owners to think all the answers are online, email marketing is one of those small business marketing strategies on the web that everyone should be using. Marketing in these modern times, an age where people have learned to drown out commercial information overload, should focus on building a relationship with customers and prospects.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to do this. Capture the emails of your clients and prospects so you can build a customer database. Then, launch an email campaign, build up brand recognition, and periodically remind people about what you offer.

There are plenty of ways to get emails using customer service forms, website email captures, promotions, receipts, customer appreciation cards, and many other tricks.

2. Press Releases

I like press releases, and you can do these offline or online. Every time your business does something newsworthy, you should issue a press release. Hire a good freelance writer to put them together for you, and if you have a good enough spin on a story, it even has the opportunity to make it into the mass media outlets, giving you some real publicity.

That said, the definition of a press release is changing, and they are a much more common tool now, so don't think you have to make history in order to release one. You can and should release an online press release every time anything happens in your business.

And I really mean anything. While it won't necessarily make it into the news, it will give your business more exposure across the web when people research your name, and besides, you never know what someone else might see as news.

3. The Dunning Mailer

The Dunning Mailer is a revolutionary direct mail technique that was made popular by a marketing genius named Dan Kennedy. Modeled after a formula debt collectors use to get money (from people who don't have money, Kennedy points out), it is a succession of mailings to the same list.

The trick is to create a sense of urgency that grows in intensity with each successive mailing. This is one of those small business marketing strategies that will exponentially increase your profits if you know how to do it right.

4. Become an Expert

If you work in a service industry, or often even if you don't, credibility is paramount, and in fact this might be one of the most important areas to focus your time and energy. There are plenty of ways to build credibility.

Write articles and circulate them on the web. Write a book and publish it on Amazon. Press releases, as I mentioned above. Writing into your local newspaper. Giving local seminars. Joining related associations.

I could write a book on this single topic alone.

5. Joint Ventures

This is one of the most highly disregarded and underestimated small business marketing strategies I can think of, as most people think it only applies to online businesses and big corporations. Joint ventures are a fantastic way to get new clients.

A marketing consultant, for instance, would make JV deals with centers of influence like accountants and lawyers, people who have a lot of exposure to business owners. A plumber might form a JV partnership with a carpenter—both benefit by pitching each other's services to customers, bringing in new leads, and possibly even collecting commissions.