When you decide to set up a new business, you will probably have already done some work to find out whether your business idea is a viable one in today’s economic conditions. If you have started this work then you have probably already given some thought to how you will market your product or service. You will get ideas from the ways that people try to market their products to you.

If you think about the different types of marketing that you receive each week, this gives an idea of what is being used in the market at the moment. If you’re setting up a food takeaway then you will obviously know that direct mail with offers and menu lists is a popular choice with similar companies as you will no doubt receive them through your letterbox on a regular basis.

If the field that you are going into is less obvious in terms of popular marketing channels then you might need to do a bit of research. However, there are some channels that are common across pretty much every type of business, such as:

Email marketing – A very popular choice for start up businesses, email marketing can be done for free or at relatively low cost. This is ideal if you don’t have much of a marketing budget and you need to get your business out there quickly. Now it isn’t as simple as just writing an email and sending it out to a list of random people. You need to build a list of contacts that will be interested in your products and/or services first of all. Once you have done that you need to think about your content and a very effective way of shaping email marketing is segmentation; where you break up your list of contacts into specific groups so that you can send more personalized content that will be more appealing to them.

Website – It should go without saying that having a website is one of the essentials for a business set up. You need to have an online presence for people to find you when they search for your services using a search engine like Google. Setting up a website doesn’t have to be expensive but it does need to be professional because this will influence people’s perception of your brand. There are loads of reasonably priced website platforms that will charge a fairly small monthly fee and provide support for you to set up your own website.

Social media – Tap into the fantastic opportunity that social media presents you with. It costs nothing to set up accounts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. but you can reach a significant volume of people through these channels. If you can create updates and content that attracts a large following of people that are interested in your products then you have done the hard part.

There are many other channels to consider but you should start with these three as a bare minimum for a successful marketing strategy. Good luck!