Free marketing advice is easier to get than you may think. It is available from a huge number of very high quality, reliable sources. So if you run a small business with a limited budget, there is no reason why shouldn’t have access to some great advice about how to market your products and services without having to pay a penny for that advice.

Here is my list of top sources for free marketing advice for your small business:

Your Local Library

The business section at your local library is packed with books about marketing. Many of these books are aimed at small businesses. They are written by marketing experts and are crammed full of useful information, tips and advice. Find your local library.

Business Link

Business Link is a free business advice and support service, available online and through local advisers. Business Link helps your business save time and money by giving you instant access to clear, simple, and trustworthy information. It is developed in partnership with subject experts within government and relevant business-support organisations to help you comply with regulations and improve your performance. Whether you’re starting up, already running a business, or looking to grow and develop, Business Link can help. Business Link’s marketing advice.

Your Local County Council

County Council’s want local businesses to succeed. For that reason they offer many services to local businesses – often free of charge. Here is an example from my local County Council: Norfolk County Council – Business Library.

This Blog

This blog is updated every Friday and is full of articles about marketing a small business including: tips & tricks, books, ebooks, software, training and useful websites. It is written by Steve Bunyan who owns Small Business Marketing and is aimed primarily at small businesses who want to improve their own marketing.What’s more it is entirely free to anyone who wants to read it.

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If you know of any other great sources of high quality free marketing advice, please leave the details in a reply below for everyone to read.

We are all becoming increasingly immune to many forms of advertising, including local newspaper advertising. So to be an effective marketing tool for small businesses, newspaper ads need to overcome that immunity by being eye-catching, interesting and different.

Bad advertising will be lost among the other ads on the page and get overlooked by the very people you want to attract.

Good advertising will do the opposite. It will stand out from the rest of the advertisements and get your product or service noticed. More importantly it will encourage people to take action and contact you.

Here are 7 tips to take to help your newspaper advertisements to get past that immunity:

1. Use a bold, broken border

Placing a bold, broken line around your ad will make it look like a coupon which will attract attention.

2. Focus on just one product or service at a time

A newspaper advertisement should sell just one product or service. It should not be an exhaustive list of everything you do or a statement which says something like “all types of work undertaken”. People are looking for a specific answer to a specific problem, not a ‘jack of all trades’. If you want to tell people about all the products or services you offer, run a different ad each week, or perhaps a series of ads all the same week in the same place on several pages of the same newspaper.

3. Start with a headline

It never ceases to amaze me how many small business advertisements start with the name of the business, which to a potential customer is utterly uninteresting. Instead, start with a big, bold headline that will grab people’s attention…

• Buy one get one free
• Sale must end Friday
• Free installation this month

…and so on.

4. Keep it simple

Unless you are a skilled copywriter, aim to get your message across in as few words as possible and keep images to a minimum. Tell the potential customer what you have to offer, how much it is and how to contact you.

5. Include a reason to act now

Unless you give someone a reason to act now, they probably won’t, so include a limited time offer, or a discount for responding quickly.

6. End with a call to action

At the bottom of your ad include a call to action…

• Phone now for a free quote
• Call today to book
• Bring this coupon into the shop for 10% discount

…and so on.

7. Record your results

Don’t make the mistake of not recording the results of your advertising efforts. Ask people how they heard about you and keep records of responses to your advertising. I have never heard of anyone complaining about being asked how they found out about a product or service at the point when they are buying it – so ask. This information will be invaluable when placing new campaigns in the future.

Follow these 7 local newspaper advertising tips and see the difference they make to your sales leads for yourself.



A unique selling point (USP) is something that sets your business, product, or service apart from the competition.

It gives your potential customers a really good, solid reason to choose you over your competition.

Perhaps it is some kind of special offer, or perhaps it is something about your product or service itself that makes you stand out from the crowd.

Maybe you sell hand-crafted, original items. Perhaps you install and maintain everything free of charge. It might be that you offer a lifetime guarantee, free delivery, or even something as simple as two for the price of one until the end of the month. Regardless of what your unique selling point is, it should be something that makes your offer more tempting to a potential customer than anything offered by your immediate competition.

Don’t forget that being the cheapest is a mug’s game, so stay away from offering the cheapest price as your USP unless you are already an expert at working on extremely tight margins.

Focus instead, on something that will add real value for your customer without costing you the earth. For example, offering a free product worth £10 will cost you less than offering a £10 discount because the product won’t cost you £10 to buy in.

Regardless of what business you are in, if you have any competition and you don’t have a unique selling point, your sales will suffer as a result.

Having a unique selling point is vital in a business of any size and in small business it is especially so.

Flyer distribution when done correctly will provide predictable and consistent results. As a rough guide, the national average in the UK is a response rate of between 0.5% and 1%. In other words, if you deliver 1000 flyers you can expect to get between 5 and 10 enquiries.

It is worth noting that the national average is based on all direct marketing including letters, leaflets, postcards, flyers etc. It is also based on all industries. So to get much more accurate figures for your business you should run a test. The test should be a minimum of 1000 flyers. Carefully record the responses received and this should be your baseline.

Whilst you may be happy with a 0.5% to 1% response, there are a number of ways to increase your results. By working on all of the following points you may well be able to achieve response rates of between 10% and 30%, or perhaps even more in niche markets.

The flyer itself

• Size – the size of your flyer will affect the cost and its readability
• Thickness – the thickness of your flyer will affect the quality people associate with it and therefore your business
• Weight – choosing the right weight of printing stock will make a huge difference to the amount of weight your flyer distributors have to carry. Consider this carefully and do the maths before ordering your flyers.
• Flyer content – getting the flyer content right is probably the biggest single factor in successful flyer distribution campaigns. Sell the benefits of your product or service, not the features. Focus on the customer and what they want, could gain, or benefit from. Don’t focus on your product, your service, or your business; people are basically selfish. They only really care about what’s in it for them. They don’t give a damn about you.
• A reason to act now – give people a reason to act now. Perhaps a special offer or a discount; and whatever you do, make it a genuine offer or discount only available to people who have the flyer. One of the best ways to alienate people from your business is to give them the same special offer or discount they can get from another source; it makes your business come across as dishonest.
• Make it time limited – putting a time limit on offers makes people act. If you don’t put a time limit on them they have no reason to act now.
• A call to action – it may sound stupid, but tell people what you want them to do. Tell them to ‘call now’, ‘visit the shop this month’, ‘send an email before Friday’ etc. and
• Printing – choose a printer that will give you a quality product. Photocopied flyers are almost always a bad idea. They will give the impression that your business cuts costs, cuts corners and offers products and services that are low quality. Spending a few pounds on quality printing is always worth doing.

The bottom line with flyer design is that you should always seek professional help unless you are certain you know what you are doing. This is because it will save you huge amounts of trial and error.

Targeting your market

Choose your target market carefully. If you are selling to businesses, focus on industrial estates, town centres, shops and offices. If you are selling to consumers focus on houses and flats.

Find out how many businesses or homes are in your target area. To do this use some of the huge amount of free information available online. A great place to start is www.mouseprice.com.

Click on Local area guide and type in a postcode or street and town. Then click Search. You will be presented with background information about the area and, down the left hand side a menu of more detailed information. Have a good look around these options and you will see that there is a lot of information there.

To work out how many flyers you will need, click on Street index for…

This will give you an alphabetical list of all the local streets, and if you then click on an individual street name it will give you a list of all the properties in that street.

Whilst a blanket approach will work, a much more targeted approach will work better, so choose your targets carefully based on all the detailed information you can find. Consider things like age, income, housing type, marital status etc. based upon what you have to offer.

Always keep accurate records of response rates and adjust your methods accordingly.

Flyer distribution options

Flyers are always most effective when delivered on their own. Inserting them into newspapers, bundling them with other flyers, or following someone else around who is delivering something else will always produce poorer results.

• Newspapers – newspapers whilst the response rates will be lower than flyers delivered on their own, newspapers often offer very cheap rates per thousand flyers, so they are worth considering and certainly worth testing.
• Distribution Companies – there are many companies who specialise in flyer distribution; Google them for your area. Always ask for references and don’t choose the cheapest.
• Self-Distribution – If you have the time, this is a very cheap and effective way to deliver your flyers exactly where you want them. The results can be very good because you can be very specific in choosing your targets.

And finally…

Flyer distribution works. Try it for yourself today.

Here are 7 ways to use offline marketing methods to generate cheap website traffic:

1. Documentation

Put your website address on ALL documents  including letterheads, business cards, flyers, sales literature, invoices, packing notes, delivery notes, compliments slips, notepads, faxes, envelopes and even cheques.

2. Packaging

Put your website address on all product packaging and instruction leaflets.

3. Corporate Clothing

Have all your staff wear corporate clothing such as t-shirts, polo shirts and jackets with your website address printed or embroidered right across the back as large as possible. This is especially good if you run a manual labour type business such as building, plumbing or gardening – lots of people will see your staff looking professionally dressed and displaying your website address.

4. Free Gifts

Print your website address on low cost, but highly relevant corporate gifts (i.e. pens, mouse mats etc.) Choose gifts which are very relevant to your business – for example an accountant might choose calculators. Give these gifts away to prospects. One way to do this is to simply walk in to the prospect’s business premises and say something like “Can I give you a free calculator with our compliments?” I suggest you avoid printing anything except your website address on the gift because we all know that curiosity killed the cat.

5. Press Releases

Write a press release about something that is both news-worthy and related to your business and send it to your local newspaper. Be sure to include your website address at the bottom of the article.

6. Vehicles

Print your website address on the back of company vehicles – see Free Advertising Ideas: Vehicle Lettering for more details.

7. Special Offers

Print flyers with a special offer code on them which can only be redeemed on your website. Hand these out to prospects or even in your local town centre. The offer code can be collected via a shopping cart or a simple contact us form.

These 7 ways to generate cheap website traffic all work; try them for yourself and see.