6 Ways To Market Your Small Business Without Spending Advertising Money

Steve Sheinkopf | September 08, 2020 | 3 Min. Read

I know this is not what you are expecting from a Yale Appliance blog. We will return with appliance-related articles tomorrow.

Six Tips To Market Your Business Without Advertising has been a side project of ours for a while.

I have been bothered by the number of family-run small businesses closing their doors during the pandemic.

For example, we celebrated the opening of our Framingham showroom in 2015 at the Framingham Beer Works. It’s now closed.

Same with Matt Murphy’s Pub in Brookline. I used to go there after watching my daughter swim at Goldfish Swim School. I sorely needed that after swim pint.

But the inspiration for this article came when we ordered food from a friend of mine during March for our Saturday lunch at Yale.

He is a good guy from a well-established restaurant, but he sounded pretty desperate like we all were in March.

He asked what we do. I gave him a pointer, and it worked for him. He called and asked for more advice, and thus our presentation was born.

Sometimes, you just need a few more tools to help your business.

6 Ways To Market Your Business Without Spending Advertising Money

Outreach - Focus on your customers
Live Chat - Online messaging to help customers
Google My Business & Yelp Listings - Take advantage of your free listings
Respond To Reviews The Right Way - Interact with your customers, thank them for their positive reviews
Email (Not Spam Mail) - Email helpful, valuable information
Content Creation - Create useful content

You don’t have to spend advertising money to market your business. None of these tips cost any money.

These tips require some effort, especially the last two. However, it's not impossible and it will become easier over time.

I used restaurants as my example for these six tips, but they apply to any business.

This presentation is entirely free. It’s roughly 30 minutes with 35 additional minutes of unscripted Q&A.

Use it, take notes, and if you know someone struggling, please feel free to share.

You can get through these tough times. You just need to think a bit differently.

How To Market Your Business [Video Presentation]

Want to check out some of our best resources? Over 600,000 people have read a Yale Guide. Short, unbiased and packed with information. Choose from 20 different topics like:

WHY SHOULD YOU TRUST US?

A few review sites have placed this at the bottom of their articles. So here is our take: Our mission is to find reliable products for you to buy. Other review sites may say this as well.

However, we don’t love every product. Quite frankly, it costs us way too much money in repair costs to support less reliable brands.

In fact, we sell fewer brands than most appliance stores. Here is why:

We feel it is our responsibility to repair your appliances after you buy them.

We now have 30 service technicians, each averaging 8-10 calls a day Monday through Friday, plus another 110 on Saturday. That's over 30,000 service calls logged in one year.

The labor rates of fixing an appliance do not come close to the true cost in any product’s warranty period.

That is why no major retailer has a service department. It costs too much labor, money and time.

Our Blog is a bit different than most others you will read. We cannot write glowing reviews of unreliable products.

Hopefully, the bloggers and organizations who write such glowing product reviews for every brand consider servicing these products first. Only then they will understand the consequences of their marketing.

Steve Sheinkopf

My goal has always been simple: I want Yale to be the best retail experience anywhere. I have tried to create a compelling environment for customers and employees alike.

A Note About Pricing

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