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Marketing doesn’t need to break your bank. The best ideas often require you to put your head down and grind.

Pay attention to these four marketing tips if you want to supercharge your business growth.

Stay consistent around brand and messaging

The importance of a consistent brand and message is often overlooked these days. The misconception is that only larger enterprises need to be super disciplined around their branding.

Sure when you’re just starting out your brand and message will be subject to small changes. That said, a strong and recognizable brand takes years to develop. So don’t wait on it.

When putting together your brand guidelines here are a few things you should look into:

  • Logo and Icon: This is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of brand. Come up with a clean logo with bold saturated colors. If you’re developing a mobile app, then you’ll also need to create an icon that represents your application.
  • Colors: This should technically come before your logo. Come up with a color palette that best fits your company mission. There’s a lot to know about how colors are perceived in business.
  • Typography: Choose a font style that you’re not going to get tired of seeing. Google Fonts provides a massive library of fonts you can download with just a click.
  • Voice: Brand goes much beyond the visuals. You need to create a voice that is consistent throughout your brand. Are you playful and funny or are you buttoned up and corporate?

If you invest in your brand from day one, you business will thank you for it later. Take GoPro for example. A simple camera company expanded into one of the most iconic action sports brands in the world. This message was instilled since the inception of GoPro to supercharge it’s calendars growth.

Make a proper website

Come on people we live in the digital age. If your business doesn’t have a website yet you’re missing out. When someone goes online to search for your business you need to meet them with a proper business website.

Many think all you need to do is whip up a simple web page with some visuals. Sure that will get the job done, but there is a ton more you can leverage from your website.

If your website is just a landing page to attract an audience, you need to give people a reason to keep coming back. One strategy is to create a company blog.

To keep things super simple, I recommend building your website on WordPress so you can easily manage your web content as well as your blog content.

Here are some things to consider when starting a blog:

  • Consistency: The more content you publish the more value you’re going to get out of the blog. At the very least, try to post at least once a week. If you’re feeling extra ambitious you can try posting daily.
  • Variety of Content: People get bored of reading the same stuff. Mix up your content by providing a good variety. Write some analysis on a recent breakthrough in the industry. Or create a guide on how to use various tools common to your industry. Remember you need to  give people a reason to come and keep coming back.
  • Links: SEO is another thing to consider when blogging. Links help build the value of your content. Make sure you link to at least two internal pages and one external.

Build up your referral network

Word of mouth advertising is arguably the most powerful form of advertising. People buy things from things they know. They REALLY buy things from people they trust. If you do well by a customer and win their trust, make sure you leverage their network to get a referral.

This is a two step process. First and foremost you need to do well by your clients. Keep an open communication with them throughout your engagement. Always be transparent even if something goes wrong. When the engagement is over it’s always important to ask the client for feedback. If the feedback is negative it’s a great time to learn where you can improve. If the feedback is positive, then it’s time to go in for the referral.

Let your client know that you enjoyed working with them and would be happy to engaged with them in the future. If they don’t have any immediate work for you (most likely the case) respectfully ask if they know anyone in their network that would like to use your services. Even if you don’t get a lead right away, the client will keep you in mind as an option for their own needs or those of their network.

Find your social channel

People throw around social media marketing as one of the most powerful marketing tools. This is definitely true, but few people truly understand the power of social.

It’s easy to say you use social media marketing hacks as one of your strategies, the hard part is knowing which channels to pursue.

Each social channel serves a different audience. That audience engages with each platform in very different ways. It’s up to you to determine the best fit.

Here are some quick things to note about social:

  • Facebook is the holy Mecca of social media. That means you’ll likely find all audiences. That said, it’s not easy to get in front of those you need. Not to mention engagement isn’t always great.
  • Instagram is arguably the best for native advertising. Instagram’s feed is optimized for content. If you produce awesome content you’ll gain a natural following with a high level of engagement.
  • Twitter is a news feed more than anything these days. You need to focus on consistency here. Use a scheduling application like Buffer to schedule out a few Tweets a day. Make sure your content is relevant to your audience. If you want to put a little extra juice behind your tweet, run a sponsored campaign with a small budget. You can get a lot of bang for your buck with sponsored Twitter campaigns.

With social, it really comes down to testing and evaluating. Try each channel and even put a few dollars behind a sponsored campaign. Before you know it you’ll see which produces the highest results. Then it’s time to focus in.

Marketing is so broad it’s often hard to know which strategies are the best to improve. That said, the four listed above are proven to work regardless the size of your business or industry.